A Top-Down Method for Program Plagiarism Detecting Systems
Plagiarism has become more and more common in universities and it is a significant problem now. Unfortunately, because of the difficulty of reading others’ source code and the complexity of source code itself, plagiarism in programming languages may often be overlooked much more than in natural languages. Early automated detecting plagiarism systems in programs employed attribute-counting techniques but recent systems, such as YAP3, Plague, Sim, have used structure comparison methods and they are more effective, accurate and have higher performance. In this paper, we propose a top-down approach that compares programs at three levels, namely, module-level, flow-chart-level, and statement-level. It appears to be a natural way that humans would do to detect similarity between programs. Primary implementation results of a program plagiarism detecting system using this approach are also presented.