Decoding code plagiarism

The topic of plagiarism in academia is as old as academia itself. It has, however, received renewed interest as a result of the recent technological advances that make it easier to cheat. This situation has also sparked the development of sophisticated tools that can be applied to detect cheating. Much has been written to clarify what constitutes plagiarism in academia and what should be done to sustain integrity in academic writing. The same cannot be said about plagiarism with reference to writing code. This paper presents arguments to illustrate why it is mach harder to define code plagiarism and consequently very difficult to curtail in an introductory programming module.