Academia, Love Me Back
I&#x27;ve had professors do this to me. I don&#x27;t understand what&#x27;s wrong with this. This is a common thing I even do when grading programming assignments. When I notice a stylistic choice that is outside of the norm for the students I can usually tell exactly who the work came from. Every semester I catch at least one group of cheaters (This semester I caught two!) and they admit to it after I confront them with it.<p>&quot;Hence&quot; is fairly common in modern English, but is it common in the writings of this student?<p>One such example of this is that one of my students used a &quot;while not in&quot; loop which they had never done before. I looked at it puzzled for a second and then went &quot;wait a minute, one of my other students used this in every lab since we introduced the while statement&quot;. I pull up the code, compare it, and BAM! I&#x27;ve got a match.<p>Just because something is possible&#x2F;correct in a language and that the person wiring the piece has every bit of ability to use the complex structure at had it doesn&#x27;t mean they would normally do so. Sure it&#x27;s not accurate, and sure you may not be right with every call (hasn&#x27;t happened to me yet but other TAs have called people out and have turned out to be wrong), but it&#x27;s something that I&#x27;d call a &quot;clue&quot; that something is different.<p>Either the student put more time into the work and found a better&#x2F;alternate way of approaching the problem, the student asked a friend to help with describing the structure (or in this case what wording to use), or in the only case that presents malice: they copied it.<p>The only way you can find out is by going to the student and confidently saying something to the effect of &quot;I know you&#x27;ve engaged in some questionalbe academic behavior, this is your time to explain yourself before I contact my boss and have them run a more though investigation&quot;. Cheaters usually crack instantly. (pro-tip for anyone on the outside who <i>is</i> cheating: just lie to us, we&#x27;re probably not going to follow up unless it&#x27;s extremely obvious if you&#x27;ve got a 1&#x2F;4 way decent explanation).<p>I see nothing wrong with this. Just talk to the professors boss and they&#x27;ll sort it out. This is especially true for cases where you actually did write the work.<p>Also, I highly doubt anyone questions the intellect of the writer. They are obviously a gifted person.