A System for Detecting Software Plagiarism | Hacker News Reader

A System for Detecting Software Plagiarism

theory.stanford.edu

9 pointslightonphiri4 comments

I took a brief peek at the paper cited by the article (http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/publications/papers/sigmod...) to see how the system worked. It uses hashes of n-grams of the submitted programs to compare similarity.

My own experience with plagiarism came when teaching a university course for CS majors. For most, the class was their second course in programming. While grading an early programming assignment I noticed a program that reminded me of one of the early ones I had already graded. Comparing the two programs revealed that they were identical, except that the variable names had been changed to protect the guilty.

I wonder if this system would have detected this case of collaboration.

Yes, MOSS does that.

I have been TA'ing a first year Python Programming course since beginning of this year; what you describe is the most common trick used by students---even though they have been told time and again that this will be detected.

As an example, MOSS picked up 91% similarity---between two students---for one of the module files.

  # Student 1
  at1 = input("Attempt 1:\n")
  at2 = input("Attempt 2:\n")
  at3 = input("Attempt 3:\n")
  maxi.append(max(eval(at1),eval(at2),eval(at3)))

  # Student 2
  attempt1 = input("Attempt 1:\n")
  attempt2 = input("Attempt 2:\n")
  attempt3 = input("Attempt 3:\n")
  maximums.append(max(eval(attempt1),eval(attempt2),eval(attempt3)))

I find it interesting that MOSS does a one-on-one comparison for each student.

I wonder, can MOSS detect cross-language plagarism? For example, if a student is asked to submit an assignment in Python, what if they find a solution on the Internet in another language (e.g. Ruby), then translate it into Python? Assuming MOSS had a database of code samples taken from the Internet to compare against (containing the solution the student used), could it detect this?

we used moss once a few years ago while i was a ta. it was interesting. we actually found a few similar programs. we were also doing a 15min oral exam with the person's code in front of us, so among the ones that has similar code, we were figuring out who wrote the original code, and who copied, etc.

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