An anti-plagiarism editor for software development courses

Abstract

Plagiarism is a serious issue in undergraduate computer science courses involving assessment of programming assignments. The electronic nature of these assignments means copying others' work is very easy, and the lack of variation between legitimately independent solutions makes the detection of plagiarised solutions difficult. The primary tool in combating plagiarism should be education of students about the issue. The need still exists however, for means to detect plagiarism when it does occur, and automated tools can provide valuable assistance in this task. Most such tools developed so far have focused on analysing the content of the final work submitted by students.In contrast this paper describes an anti-plagiarism approach based on consideration of the entire process of producing the submitted source-code, rather than just the source-code itself. It describes a text editor and related software which have been implemented based on the Eclipse development environment. These tools aim to discourage plagiarism by making the copying process more labour-intensive, and to aid in detection by storing data about document creation along with the document content.

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