On 31/05/2020 16:25, [redacted] Shengwei wrote:

Dear Professor,

I’m quite confused about the mark that came out on moodle on May.29th. I recalled getting 90 100 100 respectively for those three separate tasks during the face to face assessment, but the final mark turns out to be only 70. I remembered that the uploaded code check is said to be only a precaution check and wouldn’t have much effect on the final mark.

Besides, I’m also baffled about that ‘Suspect of copying’ comment. I can assure you that I wrote all the code on my own without any help from other people or any unauthorized reference to other people’s work. Java Programming module is my favorite among all second-year courses. A lot of my time and effort is dedicated to these assignments in order to make the code as perfect as possible, and I have enjoyed every second of it. Therefore, it really hurts when I’m being regarded as suspect of copying. I’m writing this email to humbly ask for more clarification on this feedback as well as the reason why such a low score is received.

Yours Sincerely,

Shengwei [redacted]

On Sun, 31 May 2020 at 20:28, [Professor] George [redacted@ucl.ac.uk] wrote:

Dear Shengwei,

The mark was decided by your marker Tom [redacted] (cc’ed). It is true that the lab examination mark was 90 but then your marker decided to drop to 70 upon examining your code.

The key reason your source files have as first line “package com.nicolaspepe;” which certainly raises a few eyebrows re possible copying.

Regards, -George & Tom

On Sun, 31/04/2020 21:28, Tom [redacted] wrote:

Hi George,

I just had a look again and since there is no other student called Nicholas Pepe, and, since I have just now realised that Nicholas Pepe is a professional footballer for Arsenal, I am willing to believe that the package name is due to the student typing in a random name when configuring the IDE, and not a result of cheating. I’ll have another look at the code and let you know.

Sorry about this!

Best wishes,

Tom

On Sun, 31/04/2020 21:39, Tom [redacted] wrote:

Hi Shengwei,

I’ve just had another look at your assignment. The code was generally good, well commented and demonstrated an understanding of polymorphism. You should avoid using generic classes such as Object in method declarations (use ListNode instead), but otherwise the code is fine.

The reason you were given a low mark is because of the line “package com.nicholaspepe”, which implied to me that the work was plagiarised from another student - generally package names contain the person or company who wrote the code (for instance, com.johnsmith, or com.ucl.ee). However if you can explain why you have called your package “com.nicholaspepe” then I will review the mark.

Best wishes,

Tom

Epilogue

On Monday 01/05/2020 03:40, [redacted] Shengwei wrote:

Dear [Tom],

Back in August 2019 when I started learning Java, I took an online Java tutorial, saying that you can name the package with your own name or the name of a corporation. As a fan of Arsenal Football Club (the one located in North London Islington), I was really pumped at that time with the club’s record-breaking signing “Nicolas Pepe”, an Ivorian coast winger from the French Top Division. So, I decided to improvise a little bit and name my first package on IntelliJ as “com.nicolaspepe”.

Since all my Java projects in year 2 are created under this package, the package name appearing at the start of all assignments is thus “com.nicolaspepe”. You can have a check on my assignment 2 code and the package name is still Nicolas Pepe. I’ve enclosed some more information regarding this footballer, and I hope that it’s useful in convincing you of my innocence.

Yours Sincerely,

Shengwei [redacted]

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