[parennoob]

EDIT: My comment completely missed that there were 100 lines of identical code noticed as well. Leaving below for context.

-------

Does anyone else find the example cited in the article rather flimsy? Out of 450, two students incorrectly used the inverse of a Boolean for a conditional – an error I have seen tens, if not hundreds of times.

Perhaps they used better ways of detecting cheating (some are covered later in the article) for uncovering the collusion in this specific case. If not, this “veteran computer science professor” is going on unnecessary witch hunts.

[danso]

The two students also shared "nearly 100 identical lines of code". The `!done` was the icing on the cake.

[parennoob]

Good point! I missed that and focused on the emphasized Boolean test, which is the first time I have seen any code in the NYTimes.

[danso]

Trivia point: One of the co-authors of the piece, Jeremy Merrill, is a programmer-journalist at the Times (and previously at ProPublica); I imagine he helped with the code:

https://www.propublica.org/nerds/item/upton-a-web-scraping-f...

http://jeremybmerrill.com/blog/2016/01/flyover.html

http://jeremybmerrill.com/clips/2013/05/updating-dollars-for...

[emmelaich]

Oddly, it's not the `!done` that is the problem, it's the `boolean done = true`. Which should be `false`

[minimaxir]

The article implies that the cited instance of text is verbatim identical, which is unusual.

[rubatuga]

Yeah but the students confessed, and it turns out the professor/administration was right. What do you have to say about that?