Software Framework for Mitigating Programming Plagiarism and Collusion

Abstract

Many mitigation strategies for programming plagiarism and collusion focus solely on either penalising students involved in such misbehaviour or manually educating students regarding the matter. This paper combines both strategies within a software framework and automates the education strategy. It informs students about plagiarism and collusion based on code similarity and instructors' expectations through an assessment submission system with three variants. Highly similar submissions are alerted, while original submissions have their similarities simulated. In addition, the quality of the submissions is also reported through static analysis. On the due date, student submissions are checked using a similarity detector that provides human-language explanations, which has two variants. Students using our framework show greater awareness of programming plagiarism and collusion, and are less likely to engage in such misbehaviours.

References

[1] Karnalim, O. Building awareness of programming plagiarism and collusion through similarity feedback generation. PhD thesis, University of Newcastle, Australia, 2022.

[2] Novak, M., Joy, M., and Kermek, D. Source-code similarity detection and detection tools used in academia: a systematic review. ACM TOCE 19, 3 (2019), 27:1–27:37.

[3] Parthasarathy, P. D., Kapoor, I., Joshi, S., and Thomas, S. Influence of personality traits on plagiarism through collusion

in programming assignments. In ACM ICER (2024), ACM, p. 143–153.

[4] Simon, Sheard, J., Morgan, M., Petersen, A., Settle, A., and Sinclair, J. Informing students about academic integrity

in programming. In ACM ACE (2018), ACM, pp. 113–122.

Authors

  • Oscar Karnalim University of Newcastle, Australia and Maranatha Christian University, Indonesia

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.31449/inf.v50i1.14027

Keywords:

academic integrity, learning technology, computing education, code similarity

Downloads

Published

04/13/2026

How to Cite

Karnalim, O. (2026). Software Framework for Mitigating Programming Plagiarism and Collusion. Informatica, 50(1). https://doi.org/10.31449/inf.v50i1.14027

Issue

Vol. 50 No. 1 (2026)

Section

Thesis summary

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