I came across this newspaper article today - Uni cheats outsource to India - “Computer Science students are farming out their coursework to cheap programmers in countries like India and university staff admit they are powerless to detect and prevent it.”

Many moons ago, far more moons than I care to admit, I was involved in the programming of Large Clunky Computers, marginally more modern than this…

… and unfortunately somebody told the bloke across the street.

Bloke Across The Street was one of those socially entrepreneurial types. If you had a bakery, he’d be after you for cut-price bread, and so forth; always keen to have the advantage of one’s acquaintance, he was.

An injury on the job had put the kybosh on his career as a contract builder. Bloke had decided to redefine himself: an adult-education course in computer programming was his choice.

It didn’t take long before I got a visit, despite my protests about being merely an unlearned clod at Programming As Taught By Tertiary Institutions. (To be fair, Bloke was taking the rudiments of programming in, and eventually arriving at workable answers most of the time.)

I got to know more about Pascal than I previously had, and traded my time for coffee and smokes while waiting for
begin
to successfully find its way to
end
(hopefully doing what was required along the way.)

Of course the help meant Bloke was doing better than many of his classmates. This was TAFE after all, not university. Classmates compared notes, and swapped listings. Some even bothered to learn from the work of their peers while doing this, before handing in their assignments.

There was, however, a chap from Overseas, who studied the main chance more than he studied the elements of program design.

Fornstoodent (for this is what I shall call him) had developed an Uncanny Knack. His listings were often almost identical with those of Bloke or other classmates. As Bloke had attached himself to me (giving me pause to think how ironic is is, that the Hindi word for “disciple” is chela), so Fornstoodent battened on to Bloke.

Naturally, Bloke’s errors were also Fornstoodent’s, but the problem was that both would fail if this stratagem was adopted.

Time for…

a little Bastardly Thinking.

Obviously, the program for the MK 1 Fornstoodent was a simple find-and-replace routine, substituting his name for Bloke’s anywhere it occurred in the listing.

WELL…

.

.

That got me thinking, and I decided to hide something in plain sight. Using ASCII values for each character, I inserted code to make both the screen and printer output go

B_o_e
[then, not a Line Feed but a Carriage Return]
_l_k
[Line Feed]

each time Bloke’s name should appear in output.

We left a few instances of Bloke’s name in comment areas (not part of the code) for Fornstoodent to find and replace.

Let’s just say Fornstoodent wasn’t up to Kryten’s standard. He wasn’t a stoodent much longer, either.

Wish me a Happy Bloggiversary, Both Of You™.