WatermarkSolutions

Scripts for adding watermarks to homework / exam solutions

There is a growing problem of students acting unethically by uploading homework and exam solutions to exploitative websites like chegg and coursehero.

Those reprehensible websites have procedures for requesting removal of copyrighted material, but the interfaces appear to be designed to be deliberately inconvenient to use.

Multiple strategies are needed to address this problem.

• Every syllabus should advise students that sharing or uploading solutions is dishonorable.

• Solutions should include a copyright statement and should state that using solutions from previous terms is dishonorable and an honor code violation.

• This repo provides another tool: custom watermarking of solutions with each student's email address. This watermark hopefully will further discourage students from uploading or sharing solutions, and may make it possible to identify students who do.

Requirements

This repo is for users comfortable with terminal scripts and Makefiles. It requires functional installations of

• The pdflatex binary from a LaTeX suite.
• A recent release of the Julia language with its executable julia in the shell path.
• The convert utility from ImageMagick.
• Python
• After installing Julia, use its package manager to add the packages FileIO, ColorTypes, ColorVectorSpace that are all used by the script run.jl.

Steps

• Write your homework/exam solution using your favorite text processor (such as LaTeX) and save it as pdf file solution.pdf. There is an example in the examples directory.

• Put the email addresses of each student into a file emails.txt with one email per line.

• Create tmp/ and output/ directories for files.

• Run the Julia script run.jl via julia -- run.jl

That script will create a pdf file for each student in the output/ directory.

For an example of such output, see example/student.pdf

• It is quite likely you will need to edit some of the scripts to set up the paths for your system to get it all to work. For example, you might need to edit the python path in the first line of merger.py to be something like #!/usr/bin/env python. These scripts are intended for "power users" who are comfortable with working at the command line.