I am ashamed to say that I know almost nothing about CVS. Therefore, what I am about to write may be complete tosh. Hopefully, there will be some kind souls that put me right on the most obvious gaffes.

The few people I have told about my idea to use CVS as an aid to discourage, and/or detect plagiarism in terms of the provenance of files, think it's a cool idea. I am not claiming that the idea is original. In fact, I seem to recall some mention in an e-mail or on a web page recently that got me to thinking along these lines. For the life of me I can't track it down with a Google search. So, what follows are uninformed - perhaps harebrained - ideas.

Questions:

• Is CVS appropriate!?
• Is it reasonable to require students to initiate, revise, and submit (some) assignments using a CVS repository?
• Is it easy to administer, and protect, such repositories from deliberate attempts to forge check-outs and check-ins, for example?
• Are there CVS clients for most/all platforms we could reasonably expect students to use?
• Are these CVS clients sufficiently mature and unobtrusive to encourage (or at least not discourage) their use by students?
• Can students use such clients to access their files outside of the Departmental intranet?
• Is CVS agnostic as far as the type/contents of the files are concerned so its use is not restricted to programming assignments?
• Are there any restrictions on the type/format of files supported by CVS? E.g do the files need to be plain ASCII text? What about Word docs, etc.?
• Are there alternatives to CVS we should consider> WebDAV?
• Would CVS be appropriate for other taks? For example, version control of departmental web-pages, etc.?
• Are there any legal technicalities that would preclude the use of CVS? For example, legislation that prevents the monitoring of an individual's performance?

I will try and find out answers to the above questions.

If it transpires that CVS is appropriate here are some thoughts on the benefits:

• It would encourage students to get their assignments started early - in fact it may be a requirement that they initiate the CVS process very early on as an initial phase of the assignment.
• It would allow members of staff to monitor the (interim) progress of students.
• It would alert members of staff to anomalous patterns of behaviour - e.g. submission of a perfect solution without any evidence of prior revision(s).
• It would help the students to recover from major mistakes made during editing/revising - they could just go back to an earlier revision.
• It may allow members of staff, for example, to seed the code tree with sample files and have these incorporated into the students' work.
• It would expose students to an example of best practise and help prepare them for work in project teams that use such technology for change management.

One criticism that could made of this proposal is that it may seem to smack of a 'big brother' approach to monitoring students and their (approach to) work. This criticism is understandable. However, is it unfair of the University, the Department, and the staff, to expect that students undertake their formal, assessed, work in a structured and controlled environment? After all, we expect students to attend and participate in tutorials and practicals which are controlled environments. Given the likelihood that more and more of our students will take advantage of PCs off-campus and/or laptops to research and prepare their work, there is no control over the provenance of submissions, etc.

Lots of questions. So far, few answers.