Plagiarism in programming assignments

Assessment of programming courses is usually carried out by means of programming assignments. Since it is simple to copy and edit computer programs, however, there will always be a temptation among some students following such courses to copy and modify the work of others. As the number of students in these courses is often high, it can be very difficult to detect this plagiarism. We have developed a package which will allow programming assignments to be submitted on-line, and which includes software to assist in detecting possible instances of plagiarism. In this paper, we discuss the concerns that motivated this work, we describe the developed software, tailoring the software to different requirements, and finally we consider its implications for large group teaching.