I see it every semester as a Computer Science professor.
Plagiarism on software assignments impacts all educational institutions from
high-priced universities to community colleges and high schools -- and it must be dealt with and
prevented! I have taken on this challenge at my college, and I am proud to say that measures I have
employed have resulted in a significant drop in plagiarism cases.
My name is Doug Estep. I work for the University of Dayton Research Institute as a software
architect and senior tech lead. I'm also an adjunct professor, teaching computer science
courses for Sinclair College in Dayton, Ohio. I originally created Estep Software Forensics as a
simple command-line tool to help me measure the similarities between software projects. Word
spread around the college of the successes I was achieving, so, based on popular demand, I
made Estep Software Forensics into a cloud service so that all professors can take advantage of
the powerful plagiarism detection algorithms.
With Estep Software Forensics, you simply upload your student projects, and it compares each
project to all current and past projects -- measuring the similarities of the algorithms used.
Common tactics used to hide the plagiarism are taken into consideration by my algorithms. The
resulting screen displays each student alongside the student they matched to, and their match
percentage. You are also provided the ability to view each method, side-by-side, to compare
the two implementations and a PDF report to keep for your records.
You are given input into how the algorithms work. Examples include, allowing you to set the
minimum match percentage that must be hit in order to be considered a match, the ability to
focus only on certain classes and packages in the evaluation, and other options such as ignoring
debug statements and string literals during the evaluation.
Estep Software Forensics only evaluates your institution's projects and only for the selected
assignment -- not every institution in the database. This distinction allows for very quick
responses that can be served back to you at the click of a button.
A demo is worth a thousand words.
right
here, right now. It's simple, free, and anonymous. The results are displayed immediately,
and you can download the free PDF report.
The power behind this service is its ability to look in the past when comparing projects.
The more projects that are uploaded, the bigger the evaluation and the bigger the benefit.
For example, it's normal for a student in your current class to be matched up to a student
2 years prior -- assuming there are two years of projects uploaded.
To take full advantage of this service,
and freely upload all of your projects from past and current classes.
Continue scrolling for more details on how the service works, including screenshots of the
workflows.
Suspecting someone of cheating and proving it are two completely different challenges. Most of the time
when I present my suspicions to the student, the student eventually confesses. Some students steadfastly
deny they cheated even when you have presented evidence to the contrary. If you decide to take action
against the student and the student decides to fight the accusation, then you must be prepared to prove it.
The only way that you can absolutely prove plagiarism has occurred is to find the source code or
the project of a past student that matches the cheating student. It's rare that the cheating
student actually knew or conspired with the past student to cheat on an assignment. More often
than not, the two students found the same solution online and turned it in. If you can find that
matching project (or multiple matching projects), then you can present a side-by-side comparison
of the matching code to the cheating student. At that point, it's laughable if the student
still denies the offense.
It is not practical to manually compare each student project to all past projects for each
assignment. That is why I created the Estep Software Forensics cloud service. It compares a
student's project to past projects for the same assignment and produces a page and a report
identifying students who used SIMILAR ALGORITHMS. It identifies cheating students in seconds and
displays the students in order of worst offenders to least.
Here is how it works.
The Estep Software Forensics cloud service does not compare each student project to every other
student in the database. Instead, it only compares the student project to current and past student
projects for the same assignment. Comparing based solely on the assignment (and not to the entire
database) allows the service to evaluate only relevant projects and within an acceptable
performance metric. However, this does require you to set up your classes and add the assignments
before you can use the service to check for plagiarism.
Estep Software Forensics streamlines the class and assignment creation by allowing you to create
class templates. A class template defines the assignments and any report configurations for the
assignment.
The next step is to create all assignments for the class template.
Classes are then created from the template. At the start of each semester, you simply create a new
class based off the template (takes just a few minutes). A class template saves a lot of time
because you are only doing the setup once for each type of class.
The final step is to add the students to the class. You can add them one at a time or import them
using a pre-defined CSV file.
Now that you have your class and assignments setup, you can check for plagiarism after each
assignment is turned in. The workflow to identify students who have plagiarized an assignment is
very intuitive -- with just four easy steps:
1 - Select the class and assignment that you want to check for plagiarism.
2 - Import or add the student projects. You can add each project one at a time or import the
projects using a pre-defined file name. We offer custom coding for this step. For example, we
created a third import option for colleges that use the Desire to Learn application
( http://d2l.com ). This allows colleges to download
the D2L projects and import them to our service -- saving a lot of time.
3 – The report criteria were initially defined on the class template with default values. You can
accept the default criteria as they were defined on the class template, or you can change them
here to meet your needs, possibly focusing on specific packages and classes within the project,
ignoring code that is considered debug statements, ignoring values contained within strings, etc.
4 – Generate the plagiarism report. This screen displays all students in the selected class that
match another student project for the assignment -- the worst offender to least.
Clicking the compare link on the Plagiarism Report page allows you to compare each method
to the matching student to visually confirm the plagiarism.
And, you can download a PDF version of the plagiarism report for your records.
Do you want to try it? It's super easy to get started!
Trying this service is free and easy. No commitment. No hassle. Just create an account and start
setting up your classes and assignments. You can evaluate this service free for 30 days. Load your
classes. Import your projects, and generate as many plagiarism reports as you want -- ALL FOR FREE.
Don't worry about cost or setting up any payment options while you are evaluating. Just create an
account and start your evaluation.
In short, you have nothing to lose, so try it out!
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