Plagiarism in programming assignments

Assessment of programming courses is usually carried out by means of progra mming assignments. Since it is simple to copy and edit computer programs, h owever, there will always be a temptation among some students following suc h courses to copy and modify the work of others, As the number of students in these courses is often high, it can be very difficult to detect this pla giarism. We have developed a package which will allow programming assignmen ts to be submitted on-line, and which includes software to assist in detect ing possible instances of plagiarism In this paper, we discuss the concerns that motivated this work, we describe the developed software, tailoring th e software to different requirements, and finally we consider its implicati ons for large group teaching.