Priya Sharma

Academic Integrity 10 min

Priya Sharma • 1 month ago

Contextualizing Programming Problems to Reduce Cheating

Instead of fighting plagiarism after submissions arrive, you can design assignments that are inherently resistant to copying. By embedding unique, student-specific context into problem statements, you make it obvious when code has been copied and also harder for AI tools to produce a correct answer. This article covers concrete techniques—parameterized test cases, local data imports, and narrative hooks—that real universities have used to cut similarity rates by over 40%.

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General 13 min

Priya Sharma • 3 months ago

How a TA Spots Refactored Code in 300 Java Submissions

Teaching assistants often face the challenge of detecting code plagiarism when students refactor submissions to evade similarity checkers. This article profiles one TA's workflow using AST-based analysis and structural fingerprinting to catch plagiarized code in a large introductory Java course, with practical techniques applicable to any programming educator.

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Tutorials 11 min

Priya Sharma • 3 months ago

A Checklist for Integrating Code Scanning Into Your CI Pipeline

Manual code review alone can't catch every bug or security vulnerability. This practical guide walks you through building a robust code scanning pipeline that integrates directly into your CI/CD workflow, covering static analysis, dependency scanning, secret detection, and policy enforcement with concrete tool configurations and real-world examples.

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AI Detection 8 min

Priya Sharma • 4 months ago

Your AI Detection Tool Is Probably a Random Number Generator

The market is flooded with tools claiming to spot AI-written code with 99% accuracy. Most are built on statistical sand. We dissect the eight fundamental flaws, from dataset contamination to meaningless confidence scores, that render their outputs little better than a coin flip for serious applications.

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General 6 min

Priya Sharma • 4 months ago

Your Static Analysis Tool Is Lying to You About Complexity

We've been sold a bill of goods on code complexity. The metrics your static analysis tool proudly reports—cyclomatic complexity, lines of code, nesting depth—are not just incomplete; they're actively misleading. They create a false sense of security while the real architectural debt compounds silently. It's time to measure what actually matters.

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General 8 min

Priya Sharma • 4 months ago

The Open Source Audit That Nearly Bankrupted a Startup

When a promising fintech startup sought Series B funding, their technical due diligence triggered a nightmare. A deep code audit revealed a sprawling, undocumented web of open-source license violations, putting their entire intellectual property—and survival—at risk. This is the story of how they navigated the legal and technical fallout, and why your codebase might be hiding the same ticking bomb.

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General 8 min

Priya Sharma • 4 months ago

The Open Source Library That Almost Got a Startup Sued

When a fintech startup's MVP launched, they received a cease-and-desist letter from a major software consortium. The culprit wasn't stolen IP—it was a 15-line function copied from a Stack Overflow answer, carrying a viral open-source license. This is the story of how hidden license contamination almost sank a company before Series A.

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General 8 min

Priya Sharma • 5 months ago

The Assignment That Broke Every Plagiarism Checker

When a Stanford CS106A professor noticed identical, bizarre logic errors across dozens of student submissions, she uncovered a cheating method no standard tool could catch. This is the story of how students exploited the very algorithms designed to stop them, and what it revealed about the blind spots in automated code similarity detection. The fallout changed how the department thinks about academic integrity.

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General 7 min

Priya Sharma • 5 months ago

The Code Review Metrics That Actually Predict Production Failures

We analyzed over 2.5 million commits across 400 projects to identify which static analysis warnings actually matter. The results challenge decades of conventional wisdom. Most teams are measuring the wrong things and missing the real signals buried in their code.

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Academic Integrity 6 min

Priya Sharma • 5 months ago

Your Students Are Copying Code You Can't See

Traditional plagiarism tools compare student submissions against each other, creating a blind spot to the internet's vast code repository. When a student copies a solution from Stack Overflow or clones a GitHub repo, standard similarity checks often fail. This article breaks down the technical and pedagogical methods to close this critical integrity gap.

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General 4 min

Priya Sharma • 5 months ago

Your Codebase Is a Mess and You're Not Measuring It

Technical debt is an invisible tax on your team's productivity. The real problem isn't that it exists—it's that most teams can't measure it. We'll break down the key static analysis metrics that turn subjective code quality debates into objective, actionable data for engineering managers and CTOs.

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AI Detection 9 min

Priya Sharma • 6 months ago

Detecting AI-Generated Code in Student Submissions: A Practical Guide

AI code generators are changing how students complete assignments. This guide provides CS educators with concrete methods to detect AI-generated code, from analyzing structural patterns to using specialized detection platforms. Learn to maintain academic integrity in the age of Copilot and ChatGPT.

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