Automated Hints Generation for Investigating Source Code Plagiarism and Identifying The Culprits on In-Class Individual Programming Assessment

Ariel Budiman,Oscar Karnalim

doi:10.3390/computers8010011

Abstract

Most source code plagiarism detection tools only rely on source code similarity to indicate plagiarism. This can be an issue since not all source code pairs with high similarity are plagiarism. Moreover, the culprits (i.e., the ones who plagiarise) cannot be differentiated from the victims even though they need to be educated further on different ways. This paper proposes a mechanism to generate hints for investigating source code plagiarism and identifying the culprits on in-class individual programming assessment. The hints are collected from the culprits’ copying behaviour during the assessment. According to our evaluation, the hints from source code creation process and seating position are 76.88% and at least 80.87% accurate for indicating plagiarism. Further, the hints from source code creation process can be helpful for indicating the culprits as the culprits’ codes have at least one of our predefined conditions for the copying behaviour.

Highlights

Plagiarism occurs when a piece of work is reused with an inadequate acknowledgement toward the original author(s) [1]
Source code plagiarism is similar to the human-language text plagiarism—which is commonly covered by Turnitin [4]—except that its domain is focused on the source code [5]
Our proposed mechanism was primarily evaluated toward two aspects: the accuracy of source code creation process & seating position to indicate plagiarism-suspected source code pairs, and the accuracy of source code creation process to indicate the potential plagiarists

Summary

Introduction

Plagiarism occurs when a piece of work is reused with an inadequate acknowledgement toward the original author(s) [1]. It is an emerging issue in academia. Most of them only enlist plagiarism-suspected cases based on the similarity degree without providing any hints about which cases should be investigated further and who is the real culprit for each plagiarism case. The culprits should be differentiated from the victims since they need to be educated in a different way The former should be taught about academic integrity while the latter should be taught to prevent their work being plagiarised

Methods

Results

Conclusion