Detecting C source code clones in college students' homework

Abstract

Many different source code clone detection methods were proposed to detect clones in commercial source codes especially in large scale source codes. However, such methods are not quite fit for detecting source code clones in college students' homework because student's source code homework may have the same logic structure. Further more, we encourage students to discuss a problem before they find the solution, thus may lead to a similar result of homework. This paper gives a proper and simple method for detecting C source code clones in college students' homework to improve the teaching efficiency and reduce the workload. This method can be easily used in other languages.