Surveillance in Programming Plagiarism beyond Techniques: an Incentive-based Fishbone Model

Lots of researches have showed that plagiarism becomes a severe problem in higher education around the world, especially in programming learning for its essence. Therefore, an effective strategy for plagiarism surveillance in program learning is much essential. Some literature focus on code similarity algorithm and the related tools can help to deal with the tedious and time-consuming task of detecting plagiarism to some extent. However, it is somewhat cursory to determine plagiarized programs only with automatic tool. Meanwhile, there is little research on incentive strategy of plagiarism surveillance. In this paper, we focus on the incentive mechanism of programming plagiarism surveillance. We aim to use some incentive strategy for plagiarism to gain the students’ learning outcome. In the context of a programming learning information system EduPCR, a fishbone model is proposed, which consists of three aspects: problem, reason, and strategy. The questionnaire and interview conducted to survey the students’ attitude about the incentive model show that the incentive model is welcome and practical in programming plagiarism surveillance. Our research is not only valuable for the programming learning but also for plagiarism surveillance of documents in other formats in academia.