CopyPoppy – A Source Code Plagiarism Detector

Abstract

As the technology advances over the years, students have flooded into courses that are related to computer science across the globe, recognizing them as an opportunity to work at known companies like Google and Facebook as one of their main interests. Though, the spike in interest for these courses coincided with an undesirable side effect: a rising number of source code plagiarism. This paper is about solving programming plagiarism problems by developing a source code plagiarism system in Java called CopyPoppy. It is important to note that there are students that understand code solutions and use them as a foundation to write their own code. These kinds of cases may not be necessarily considered as plagiarising as they are only using other’s source code as an inspiration for their finished code. Therefore, there are a lot of aspects that need to be taken into account when deciding whether a source code is plagiarised or not. Therefore, CopyPoppy is designed to be able to distinguish between what is considered plagiarism and what is not. The existence of CopyPoppy hopefully will encourage more and more students to learn and write their own source code with their highest level of ability and quality as a way to develop self-discipline and to grasp their level of understanding through concepts and skills that they have learnt.