Authors:
Bruno Prado
;
Kalil Bispo
and
Raul Andrade
Affiliation:
Federal University of Sergipe, Brazil
Keyword(s):
Plagiarism Detection, Computer Programming, E-learning, Source Code Similarity, Re-factoring, Obfuscation.
Related
Ontology
Subjects/Areas/Topics:
Computer-Supported Education
;
e-Learning
;
e-Learning and e-Teaching
;
Enterprise Information Systems
;
Information Systems Analysis and Specification
;
Software Agents and Internet Computing
;
Software Metrics and Measurement
Abstract:
In computer programming courses programming assignments are almost mandatory, especially in a virtual classroom environment. However, the source code plagiarism is a major issue in evaluation of students, since it prevents a fair assessment of their programming skills. This paper proposes an obfuscation resilient approach based on the static and dynamic source code analysis in order to detect and discourage plagiarized solutions. Rather than focusing on the programming language syntax which is susceptible to lexical and structural refactoring, an instruction and an execution flow semantic analysis is performed to compare the behavior of source code. Experiments were based on case studies from real graduation projects and automatic obfuscation methods, showing a high accuracy and robustness in plagiarism assessments.