Self and peer assessment in software engineering projects

Abstract

Plagiarism is a serious issue in undergraduate computerscience courses involving assessment of programmingassignments. The electronic nature of these assignmentsmeans copying others' work is very easy, and the lack ofvariation between legitimately independent solutionsmakes the detection of plagiarised solutions difficult. Theprimary tool in combating plagiarism should be educationof students about the issue. The need still exists however,for means to detect plagiarism when it does occur, andautomated tools can provide valuable assistance in thistask. Most such tools developed so far have focused onanalysing the content of the final work submitted bystudents.In contrast this paper describes an anti-plagiarismapproach based on consideration of the entire process ofproducing the submitted source-code, rather than just thesource-code itself. It describes a text editor and relatedsoftware which have been implemented based on theEclipse development environment. These tools aim todiscourage plagiarism by making the copying processmore labour-intensive, and to aid in detection by storingdata about document creation along with the documentcontent.