PlagZap: A Textual Plagiarism Detection System for Student Assignments Built with Open-Source Software

Abstract

Plagiarism among university students is an important issue that affects their preparation and undermines the universities’ efforts to prepare skilled graduates. Universities try to fight-back this problem with strict ethics policies, but they require the proper plagiarism detection tools, at affordable costs, to implement these policies. In this paper, we present PlagZap, a cost-efficient, high-volume, and high-speed plagiarism detection system built using open-source software and designed to be used on textual student assignments (essays, theses, homework). We discuss the advantages of this design with respect to speed, precision and costs.