Exploring the Usage of Existing Plagiarism Tools for Automated Student Assessment for Java Program

Abstract

Plagiarism is the act of copying someone else work without acknowledging the person. Various plagiarism tools exist for natural and programming languages to check if the offence has been committed. This paper discusses the use of plagiarism tools for automated assessment of student java programs. Automated assessment involves evaluating or assessing student’s work automatically with the aid of computer. Plagiarism tools are utilized for finding similarity between teacher and student solution. In order to test if the existing tools for source code plagiarism detection can be used to find similarity between student and teacher solutions and how the tools behave in case of different structural and lexical modifications, two of the existing tools. JPlag and Ferret are used to test teacher’s solutions with students’ solutions with different structural and lexical modifications. Jplag was further explored with larger testbed, however variations in the results were observed making it difficult to conclude the usage of existing