Automated hints generation for investigating source code plagiarism and identifying the culprits on in-class individual programming assessment

Abstract

Most source code plagiarism detection tools only rely on source code similarity to indicate plagiarism. This can be an issue since not all source code pairs with high similarity are plagiarism. Moreover, the culprits (i.e., the ones who plagiarise) cannot be differentiated from the victims even though they need to be educated further on different ways. This paper proposes a mechanism to generate hints for investigating source code plagiarism and identifying the culprits on in-class individual programming assessment. The hints are collected from the culprits’ copying behaviour during the assessment. According to our evaluation, the hints from source code creation process and seating position are 76.88% and at least 80.87% accurate for indicating plagiarism. Further, the hints from source code creation process can be helpful for indicating the culprits as the culprits’ codes have at least one of our predefined conditions for the copying behaviour.