Week 14 Set a
Due Date Mon at 9pm (Week 14)
Purpose To understand that programmers who give code away or who take code from others go to prison
Graded Exercise
We will grade this exercise (25 points).
Background It was brought to our attention that many of you may have shared ideas and code for some of the recent problem sets, especially Week 13 Set b. We ran a plagiarism-discovery tool on your submissions and were able to confirm some amount of oversharing. Instead of reporting all suspicious submissions to Northeastern’s office of academic integrity (OSCCR), we have decided to add a high-value exercise.
Individual Work You will not work on the exercise with your partner. Each of you must come up with your own answer and submit the answer separately.
The first reference in Interesting Articles points to an WSJ article on a programmer who went to prison for giving away a code base.
Read the article and reflect on the story.
Student S continually pressures her friend F to send her solutions to problem sets. F does not want to lose S as a friend, but she also thinks S should not leverage their friendship. Recently the pressure has become intensive and vicious.
What should F do after enduring S’s requests for a while?
Student T gives in to E’s pressure and emails his solution to problem set 13b. Soon enough E regrets his action and decides to throw away his copy of T’s code, but after he already shared it with several of his friends.
What should E do now?
Student W suspects four students in her course of cheating because she observed them sitting and working together on the day a major assignment was due. She opens an anonymous Gmail account and sends an anonymous accusation to the head instructor of the course. A couple of days later she meets one of the four at the local coffee shop and finds out that the four of them were asked to collaborate on a project in a different course.
What should W do in response?
Students U and V are not paired up to work together, but both of their partners are too lazy to solve the last exercise on problem set 13b. Because U and V are afraid for their final grade, they decide to work together and jointly solve the last problem. After they turn in the solutions, U’s partner H finds out that U collaborated with V.
What should H do about his partner?
Pick one of the above scenarios. Articulate a concise paragraph (at most 50 words) that answers the related question and justifies your answer.
send the email from your Husky email account
send the email to your instructor’s email address as specified in these course notes
write "14a" on the subject line and the number of the chosen scenario, separated by at least one blank space
include the paragraph in the body of the message with one leading blank line.
Rubric The instructors will use three criteria to evaluate your paragraph: (1) your ethical choice; (2) the sentence-level organization of your paragraph; (3) grammatical and lexical correctness.