AC: An Integrated Source Code Plagiarism Detection Environment

Plagiarism detection in programming assignments is still a very problematic issue, in terms of economic costs, conceptual controversy, legal risks, and detection algorithms and heuristics. In this paper, we present AC: an integrated environment for the study of plagiarism and a powerful tool for its detection. We explain the special design of AC, prepared for unlimited improvement and external contributions, and how it can be used for detecting plagiarism. In particular, the special visualization of the results that AC offers, together with the statistical analysis that it performs provide different useful heuristics to catch suspects. Besides, AC incorporates different measures of similarity: old and new developed by our group. Finally, we study the performance of AC in two practical examples of programming assignments submission. 1 ar X iv :c s. IT /0 70 31 36 v1 28 M ar 2 00 7