Can post a code but afraid of plagiarism

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Jan 20, 2014 at 6:39 PM, Ben Finney <ben+python at benfinney.id.au> wrote:
> But sometimes different skills are being examined, and the student
> should be exercising skills on their own without basing it directly on
> the work of others. In these cases, penalties for plagiarism are
> appropriate, would you agree?

If Fred writes something and Bill copies it without acknowledging
Fred's work, then Bill should be penalized. That much is clear. That
aligns well with the requirement to see what each student can
accomplish, and with standard copyright law (including open source,
where requirement-to-acknowledge is a common part of both licensing
and courtesy). But why should Fred be punished? What has he done
wrong? If it can be proven that Fred wrote the code (granted, that's
hard to prove, but providing each student with a git/hg repo to push
code to every day would make it easier), he should be graded on that
code and not on the fact that someone else ripped it off.

When it's less clear who copied from whom, I can understand issuing
across-the-board penalties in the interests of fairness (and because
the effort of figuring out who wrote what isn't worth it), but I'd say
it's a compromise for simplicity rather than justifiable punishment on
someone who published code.

ChrisA