[asdff]

Yes, and I've been one, and know that time is finite and you have more than one class that demands work on a deadline, along with all the other fun stuff college has that pulls you away from your studies, and the not so fun stuff like part time employment. If you leave the system as it is today, its easy to copy and paste code. If you do something akin to what I proposed, you've eliminated copy and paste, and made cheating into a literal chore that isn't saving you nearly as much time as it would have otherwise, and fewer students will end up cheating. You'd be surprised at how many students I knew in undergrad who would be broke and would still pay like $400 a semester on textbooks because the friction of doing hackery things like photocopying chapters of the book in the library, or googling "my math book 2nd ed. pdf" and finding the library genesis result was just too much.

Of course the death blow for this sort of cheating is the exam, which you weight quite a bit more than the homework. A student who just copy and pastes code will still fail the class, since they can't use chatgpt in the lecture hall during exam time.

[jefftk]

And then someone in the dorm makes a keystroke injector, and everyone goes back to typing their code on their own computer.

Ex: https://null-byte.wonderhowto.com/how-to/make-your-own-bad-u...

[asdff]

IT dept can disable loading volumes that aren't the university shared drive for assignment turn in. They can also supply laptops vs desktops with wired keyboards.

[jefftk]

I'm proposing a device that pretends to be a keyboard, and mimics typing in the code

[asdff]

And a counter for that could be a laptop device with the usb ports disabled. A lot of this stuff is solved with some basic IT imo.

[jefftk]

You're now well past the original proposal of a Raspberry Pi. And people who need different input devices for ergonomic reasons (laptops keyboards are not a good fit for many people) are going to push back hard.

The device can make network connections, right? Someone's going to come up with a very short program you can type by hand, compile, and then pull down arbitrary other code over the network.

[asdff]

Honestly I appreciate the exercise pentesting my hypothetical academic computer. Lets drop full network access entirely then. Allow it to only connect to a university intranet for assignment deposits, along with plenty of logging of what happened on the device. Lets rule out the "typing verbatim" method too by checking whether the user typed in all in one go or spent time debugging and revising using our own keylogger perhaps. If they need special tooling to interface with the computer, that will probably come with a recommendation from student disability services and be totally legit.

Its a classic arms race, but at the end of the day with enough effort on the issue, IT departments will either win entirely, or make it hard enough to cheat for the vast majority of users that only the extremely small minority who do manage to cheat probably deserve a cs degree. If its hard people won't do it, just like how they keep buying textbooks because finding a free pdf online is only slightly harder, but enough effort to put off most people from forcing campus bookstores out of business.

[dinkumthinkum]

Yeah but what you’re talking about is a simple typing exercise.