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Moderators: Original exam questions / Java SE questions sorting /"Fan club" voting detection
 

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Dear Moderators,


This is a follow up to news item Are your questions original posted last month. In it we asked users to please read How to write a quality question.
It was our way of gently saying: "we've discovered copy+paste questions."

Aside from risking copyright infringement, please understand that we want to avoid using copy+paste exam questions. The application to mass-author exam questions is for users to build ORIGINAL exams.

The JavaBlackBelt policy: questions posted MUST BE original - authored by the user who posted them. That means no duplication of a question copied verbatim from an already published source.

To ensure the originality of the exam questions, we are sifting through the database to find copy+paste questions. (Thanks to Jeanne Boyarsky, we also have a nifty application for quick sifting.)

The "cleanup" method

  1. we ask the user to delete these question(s) and notify us when it has been done;
  2. if they do not reply appropriately or react, our moderators/administrators will delete them

To encourage this effort, a new points system for these discoveries is in effect as of today:

  • AWARD 10 contribution points to the user who notified us the questions for a certain user were plagarized - INCLUDING the original question(s) source.
  • AWARD 1 contribution point/question to the mod/admin who did the cleanup.

To help with the cleanup, please send an email to moderator_boyarsky AT javablackbelt DOT com

PLEASE . . .

  • use subject line: "Reauthored questions"
  • include the links to the questions and the original source of the questions (links, book titles, ...)

Java SE questions sorting

We'd like to shout out a huge "THANKS" to moderators who continue to help us with this. The exams still need more sorting. We welcome you to help us ;-)
To learn how the sorting works, please read Sorting questions out of the Java SE Basic exam.

"Fan club voting" detection

We've also noticed that some users have created their own "fan clubs" of users with low-to-no activity - except when they are voting!
We built a tool to detect fake votes from "fans." It sends a "gotcha" email to the user suspected up "fan votes."


Thanks for taking the time to read this!