I've been learning the basics of programming as a course needed for school. There's a rumor going around that the profs know when your cheating if you copy/paste other peoples code. I was just wondering if there is any truth to this as my searches through google have produced no useful info.
Rumors? More like facts, I'd think. If you can look at your friend's essay and tell if they copy-pasted it, your professor can just as easily look at your code and notice the very different coding style(s).
...Seriously? What a great first post! All your professor would have to do (at the very LEAST) is copy/paste a few lines of your code into Google and see if it produces any results. Your professor could also have tools that check for things like this (yes, they exist.)
not only that, if the prof suspects you are cheating, he can just sit you down and ask you a couple questions about the implementation (especially if you are a beginner and decide to copy-and-paste code)
with a short query, he could easily determine if you've cheated or not
If you were teaching a ESL class and a student came in with a well written and formated paper, using big words, what would you think? Your professor can read the language much much better then you can I'm guessing, assuming you need to cheat.