Stress greatly increased by lack of features

CS Principles Website and Tools Questions
1

Not having the ability to assign and un-assign (hide) assessments in App Lab greatly increases my stress.

I make apps (tests), which are templates I give students, and students complete the app. I have three classes. If I give a test to one class, then, by the way Code.org is designed, they keep these apps and can share them with others. It’s extremely annoying and creates an abundance of extra work and stress.

2

As far as i’m aware you should be able to turn off link sharing from student project accounts (by default)… although that probably will not deter all students from just copying the code result

as for what i would suggest you do is slightly modify the end goal of each assignment (tests) and at points of it ask students to explain their method of thinking (can be just code comments or later on) vs just grading the code in the template

Here’s some examples that you can change

  • change the ids of certain UI elements (runBtn, homeScreen, etc…)
  • change what events you want them to use (mouseDown, input, etc…)
  • have different screen layouts (formatting of text being used)
  • change the initial prompt of the task being asked of them
  • rearrange & tailor questions to modified task

you can then compare responses from all classes or use something like turnitin to also check for similar responses from that class or other ones to prevent direct plagiarism

that way if someone does decide they want to use a previous classes responses they will have to put in a considerable amount of more effort understanding and fixing up the code to behave properly without being caught

ooor if you wanna get real sneaky you can add zero-width utf8 into the template and insert it into one of the comments that isn’t supposed to be removed and use 1, 2 or 3 of them to tell if a direct copy paste was performed
EX:

// varriable declaration​
// varriable declaration​​
// varriable declaration​​​

if done carelessly you’ll know instantly these may all look the same but they have 1 - 3 zero-width spaces in them and since there instruction comments you can just tell students to not touch or remove them

TLDR; there should be a way of disabling project sharing by default though my suggestions may be more work it may discourage people from being incentivized to copy and modify

Varrience