Overview

One of the mechanisms designed to catch cheating students is providing many false positives with ignorant students.
To streamline the student learning experience, we want to reduce that by converting some conditions currently marked as errors to mere warnings. We can leverage the observer.notifyWarning() to send warning text that will be displayed to students.

Current Failure Conditions & Messages

We want to downgrade the following conditions:

• Suspicious commit history. Multiple commits have the exact same timestamp.
• Suspicious commit history. Not all commits are in order.

@19mdavenport Would you like any other messages to be downgraded in severity as well?

• String.format("Not enough commits to pass off (%d/%d).", numCommits, requiredCommits)
• String.format("Have some commits, but some of them are too insignificant for credit (%d/%d).", significantCommits, requiredCommits)
• String.format("Did not commit on enough days to pass off (%d/%d).", daysWithCommits, requiredDaysWithCommits)
• "Suspicious commit history. Some commits are authored after the hand in date."
• "Suspicious commit history. Some commits are authored before the previous phase hash."
• "Suspicious commit history. Some commits have been backdated."
• "Missing tail hash. The previous submission commit could not be found in the repository."

Difficulty

We'll need to improve our logic to remove discount any of the commits included in the warning conditions. We can subtract them from the total number of valid commits.

It would be more difficult to re-process the number of unique days. That shouldn't matter with the current set of warning conditions, but it could matter with future warning conditions and may be worth designing a more general approach.