Efficient plagiarism detection for software modeling assignments
Salvador Martínez, Manuel Wimmer, Jordi Cabot · Computer Science Education · 2020
Background and Context Reports suggest plagiarism is a common occurrence in universities. While plagiarism detection mechanisms exist for textual artifacts, this is less so for non-code related ones such as software design artifacts like models, metamodels or model transformations.Objective To provide an efficient mechanism for the detection of plagiarism in repositories of Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) assignments.Method Our approach is based on the adaptation of the Locality Sensitive Hashing, an approximate nearest neighbor search mechanism, to the modeling technical space. We evaluate our approach on a real use case consisting of two repositories containing 10 years of student answers to MDE course assignments.Findings We have found that: (i) effectively, plagiarism occurred on the aforementioned course assignments (ii) our tool was able to efficiently detect them.Implications Plagiarism detection must be integrated into the toolset and activities of MDE instructors in order to correctly evaluate students