Plagiarism detection tool “Parikshak”

Abstract

Source code plagiarism has been a concern for many teachers in computer science field, given to the ease of availability of content in this era of internet. We developed a tool for detecting plagiarism in source codes of students learning programming languages, to cater to the needs of teachers and help them monitor students source codes. Currently our tool supports six programming languages namely, C, C++, Java, Perl, Python and Php. The tool works in three steps. Tokenization followed by N-Gram representation of source codes and then comparison using Greedy String Tiling algorithm. Response time of our tool is one minute for 50 source code files of length 75 lines of code (LOC). The feedback given by the teachers after using our tool, in one of our post graduate courses for advance computing, is over whelming. As per them results given by the tool are ninety-nine percent correct. So we strongly believe that this tool can help to analyse student's true capabilities and help the teachers tremendously in plagiarism detection.