Simulating Similarities to Maintain Academic Integrity in Programming

Abstract

Programming students need to be informed about plagiarism and collusion. Hence, we developed an assessment submission system to remind students about the matter. Each submission will be compared to others and any similarities that do not seem a result of coincidence will be reported along with their possible reasons. The system also employs gamification to promote early and unique submissions. Nevertheless, the system might put unnecessary pressure as coincidental similarities can still be reported. Further, it does not specifically cover self-plagiarism. We revisit the system and shift our focus to report simulated similarities from student own submission instead of reporting actual similarities across submissions. According to our evaluation with 390 students and five quasi-experiments, students with simulated similarities are slightly more aware of plagiarism and collusion, self-plagiarism in particular. Their awareness of the matter is somewhat acceptable (around 75%) and they see the benefits of our assessment submission system.