Detecting Pervasive Source Code Plagiarism through Dynamic Program Behaviours

Source code plagiarism is a persistent problem in undergraduate computer science education. Unfortunately, it is a widespread phenomena with many students plagiarising either because they are unwilling or incapable of completing their own work. Many source code plagiarism detection tools have been proposed to identify suspected cases of source code plagiarism. However, these tools are not resilient to pervasive plagiarism-hiding transformations that significantly change the structure of source code. In this paper, two case studies are presented that explore how resilient current source code plagiarism detection tools are to plagiarism-hiding transformations. Furthermore, an evaluation of a new advanced technique for source code plagiarism detection is presented to show that is it possible to identify pervasive cases of source code plagiarism. The results of this evaluation indicate the technique is robust in its ability to identify the same program after it has been transformed.