Reducing Effects of Plagiarism in Programming Classes

Large programming classes are traditionally an area of concern for maintaining the integrity of the educational process. Systematic inspection of all program solutions for evidence of plagiarism can be done using an automated tool. The ``Measure Of Software Similarity'' tool developed by Alex Aiken at the University of California at Berkeley analyzes a set of programs to detect evidence of “duplicates.” However, experience in applying this sort of plagiarism detection in a large programming class indicates that the main long-term effect may be to simply shift the source of plagiarism. This possibility leads to considering the reason for fighting plagiarism and then to exploring additional techniques aimed at reducing the perceived motivation for plagiarism.