Plagiarism detection in students’ programming assignments based on semantics: multimedia e-learning based smart assessment methodology

Abstract

The multimedia-based e-Learning methodology provides virtual classrooms to students. The teacher uploads learning materials, programming assignments and quizzes on university’ Learning Management System (LMS). The students learn lessons from uploaded videos and then solve the given programming tasks and quizzes. The source code plagiarism is a serious threat to academia. However, identifying similar source code fragments between different programming languages is a challenging task. To solve the problem, this paper proposed a new plagiarism detection technique between C++ and Java source codes based on semantics in multimedia-based e-Learning and smart assessment methodology. First, it transforms source codes into tokens to calculate semantic similarity in token by token comparison. After that, it finds semantic similarity in scalar value for the complete source codes written in C++ and Java. To analyse the experiment, we have taken the dataset consists of four (4) case studies of Factorial, Bubble Sort, Binary Search and Stack data structure in both C++ and Java. The entire experiment is done in R Studio with R version 3.4.2. The experimental results show better semantic similarity results for plagiarism detection based on comparison.