1st Hopper Day, Plagiarism Poster

Today is the first day of the
Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing (aka GHC 2008)
in Keystone, Colorado. I have lived most of my life at sea level in
the San Francisco Bay Area, so the dry thin air here in the Rocky
Mountains (at 9,300 feet) takes some getting used to. The hotel
is very pleasant but only offers heat – no cooling in the rooms.
Our room has a lovely mountain view but it heats up fast when the
sun hits the windows. We have the humidifier going full and the
balcony door open for cooling – not the most efficient combination.

This morning,
Tanya Jankot and I unpacked the Sun Microsystems shipment boxes and set
up our company table in the exhibit hall. We have already given away
several boxes of the Java 10 year commemorative book (with signed
card by James Gosling), Sun
pens, and Women@Sun sticky note cubes. We will be giving away Sun Women
in Engineering tshirts (in six languages!) starting this afternoon.

My daughter

Jessica flew in this morning from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Her
suitcase has not yet arrived. However, Jessica carried her four
foot square
Hopper poster in her arms most of the way so it is in good shape
for the opening session tonight. We put it up in the poster hall a
little while ago – it looks interesting and very well done. I am so
proud of her!

Jessica’s poster topic is “How to Combat Plagiarism in Academia
(and How Not To)”. It presents her research on how major universities
(including CMU, Stanford, MIT, CalTech, Indian Institute of Information Technology – Allahabad), address the potential
for plagiarism through technical and non-technical solutions (such
as honor codes). Some of Jessica’s conclusions:

“Companies which sell technical solutions to academic plagiarism argue that students cheat and that the only way to stop them is to use a commercial technical solution. In this poster I have shown

1. Three of five top [Computer Science] schools in the world choose to rely on non-technical approaches to plagiarism—Honor Codes.
2. I have found no data suggesting that schools which employ a technical solution have more honest academic cultures.”

Jessica started thinking deeply about this topic (both plagiarism
and treating students as “guilty until proven innocent”) when she served
on the Harker Judicial Committee
during her Senior year in High School. (She is now a Sophomore at CMU.)
I hope she will continue this interesting research.