A unified approach to automate the usage of plagiarism detection tools in programming courses

Abstract

Plagiarism in programming assignments is an extremely common problem in universities. While there are many tools that automate the detection of plagiarism in source code, users still need to inspect the results and decide whether there is plagiarism or not. Moreover, users often rely on a single tool (using it as “gold standard” for all cases), which can be ineffective and risky. Hence, it is desirable to make use of several tools to complement their results. However, various limitations exist in these tools that make their usage a very time-consuming task, such as the need of manually analyzing and correlating their multiple outputs. In this paper, we propose an automated system that addresses the common usage limitations of plagiarism detection tools. The system automatically manages the execution of different plagiarism tools and generates a consolidated comparative visualization of their results. Consequently, the user can make better-informed decisions about potential plagiarisms. Our experimental results show that the effort and expertise required to use plagiarism detection tools is significantly reduced, while the probability of detecting plagiarism is increased. Results also show that our system is lightweight (in terms of computational resources), proving it is practical for real-world usage.