Issues Related to the Detection of Source Code Plagiarism in Students Assignments

Abstract

Detecting similarity or plagiarism in the academic research publications, source code, etc. has been a long time complex and time consuming task. Several algorithms, tools and websites exist that try to find plagiarism or possible plagiarism in those human creative products. In this paper we used source code plagiarism detection tools to assess the level of plagiarism in source codes. We also investigated issues related to accuracy and challenges in detecting possible plagiarism in students’ assignments. In a second study, we evaluated some tools against detecting possible plagiarism in research papers. Results showed that such process or decision is not binary to make and that subjectivity is high. In addition, there is a need to tune plagiarism detection tools to give criticality or weights by users of those tools to categorize and classify different levels of seriousness for committing plagiarism.