Integrating source code plagiarism into a virtual learning environment: Benefits for students and staff

Source code plagiarism is a growing concern in computing related courses. There are a variety of tools to help academics detect suspicious similarity in computer programs. These are purpose-built and necessarily different from the more widely used text-matching tools for plagiarism detection in essays. However, not only is the adoption of these code plagiarism detection tools very modest, the lack of integration of these tools into learning environments means that they are, if used, just intended to identify offending students, rather than as an educational tool to raise their awareness of this sensitive problem. This paper describes the development of a plugin to integrate the two well-known code plagiarism detectors, JPlag and MOSS, into an open source virtual learning environment, Moodle, to address the needs of academics teaching computer programming at an Australian University. A study was carried out to evaluate the benefits offered by such integration for academics and students.