Cheating students

I've been marking assignments last week, and I caught some students in my course cheating. At this stage, it looks as though two of them copied another student's partly complete assignment and then turned in almost the exact same project. To cover their tracks, they went to the enormous effort of renaming ONE variable. Just one.

I actually feel really gutted about this. I've never had students cheat like this before. I've had the odd one or two who turned to the google-copy-paste strategy (and weren't clever enough to cover their tracks), and some who may have collaborated a shade too closely, but I've never had this kind of wholesale copying before.

In a class of only 38 students, do they really think I won't notice three almost identical solutions?

The funny thing is that the renaming of the variable did absolutely nothing to help cover their tracks. I have standards I expect the students to follow with regard to naming conventions, and for some parts of what we are doing, there really isn't that much algorithmic variability. Most of the students who use my examples as a guide will probably end up with very similar answers. But they won't have the exact same spacing between lines, between methods, within comments, inside and between regions, and the chances of any two students having their class diagram and dataset designer layouts exactly the same are practically nil.

In a Visual Studio project, what really gives the game away is white space and layout. Maybe I should write some cheat detection code to analyse patterns of white space?