Preventing and Detecting Plagiarism in Programming Course

Student plagiarism is epidemic in universities. In computer programming education process, it is very common that students copy or modify other’s code as their own work. Because every course having numerous assignments, detected plagiarism will be very difficult and extremely time consuming. How to prevent the plagiarism in programming course is an important problem in education. This paper analyzes and expatiates the reasons and the methods about the code’s plagiarism, and thinks there are two phases in preventing this plagiarism: one is preventing plagiarism from occur, the other is to detect cases of plagiarism when the preventative measures fail. Preventing plagiarism methods mainly include the valid course assignment design and to forbid the electronic copy. This paper describes a code’s editor software which has been implemented use Java. When the preventative measures fail, this paper describes an automatic tool to help instructor find the suspicious targets. These phases’ aim is to cut down the plagiarism and improve the ability of the student’ programming