Plagiarism by Student Programmers

Abstract

own work. This includes students who collaborate and submit similar work. Such plagiarism is felt to be common, though the true extent is hard to assess. Quoting from [12]: ``As with Nessie of Loch Ness there does not seem to be a clear picture of this beast, only a variety of eyewitness reports.'' This article focuses on two events, referred to here as the UTSA experiment and the MIT incident. During the fall 1990 and spring 1991 semesters at the University of Texas at San Antonio, an experiment detected 29 students in a data structures course involved in plagiarism. In the spring 1990 semester, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology disciplined 73 students for cheating in a beginning programming course [1]. In both cases there was a special check for copying that was not common practice at the school and was unanticipated by the students. These events span the spectrum from a smaller state university to a prestigious private school, and in both cases students involved ranged from freshmen to seniors. The events suggest a significant plagiarism problem in programming courses everywhere--perhaps more of a problem than many realize. Plagiarism of student programs has fundamental differences from ordinary plagiarism-- making it easier to carry out and harder to detect. In contrast with a student writing an English term paper, beginning programming students typically work in the same environment on the same problem, and one expects

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