A Comparison of Three Popular Source code Similarity Tools for Detecting Student Plagiarism.

This paper investigates automated code plagiarism detection in the context of an undergraduate level data structures and algorithms module. We compare three software tools which aim to detect plagiarism in the students' programming source code. We evaluate the performance of these tools on an individual basis and the degree of agreement between them. Based on this evaluation we show that the degree of agreement between these tools is relatively low. We also report the challenges faced during utilization of these methods and suggest possible future improvements for tools of this kind. The discrepancies in the results obtained by these detection techniques were used to devise guidelines for effectively detecting code plagiarism.