Efficient use of source code plagiarism detection tools in academia

Abstract: Source code plagiarism detection tools have been readily available for use in academia and industry for a long time. While there are many motivations for the usage of these tools in Computer Science education, they are often not implemented on an institutional level. This thesis will describe an efficient process of using source code plagiarism detec-tion tools in academia today. A literature review and a survey will be used to describe the process of finding source code plagiarism. A survey will collect some attitudes of instructors that affect the qualitative concept of efficiency. An interview with respondents using a tool integrated in a learning management system will collect more attitudes regarding efficiency. The administration of source code plagiarism detection tools will be analyzed. The process can be divided into collection, analysis, confirmation, and investigation. Some stages can be fully or partly automated with human intervention. Without integration into a learning management system, the efficiency already gained in the collection stage by using a learning management system will be lost. Some respondents were satisfied with the process of finding source code plagiarism without using any tool. The motivations of using plagiarism detection tools differ among respondents, but they shared positive attitudes of using a tool and using it more often. An efficient process is a university with a plagiarism policy that seeks plagiarism automatically without prior suspicion, using a tool integrated in a learning management system or a repository, with similarity reports of good usability.