Programming plagiarism as a social phenomenon

Abstract

This paper describes a classroom experiment in which detected cases of programming plagiarism were correlated with the classroom's social network. The results suggest that it is possible to understand the amount of similarity between artifacts as an indirect measure of the student social network. These findings imply that it is possible to uncover the classroom social network using only the source code produced by the students. The proposed method may be used as an instrument for considering and applying social techniques to improve student learning. This research is the first step in redefining the role of plagiarism detection in the programming assessment process as an effective learning intervention tool as opposed to a simple disciplinary procedure.