Plagiarism Monitoring and Detection – towards an Open Discussion

Plagiarism in programming courses is a pervasive and frustrating problem that undermines the educational process. Often plagiarism falls in the gray area separating profitable peer-peer collaboration, excessive dependence on others, and outright cheating. Unless the evidence is compelling, pursuing suspected plagiarism is generally not worth the emotional and legal risks to student and teacher alike. This paper proposes a metrics-based approach to monitoring patterns of similarities among student programs that may signal the onset of excessive collaboration or plagiarism. Publishing anonymous results from monitoring creates a climate in which plagiarism is discussed openly.