Plagiarism Detection (within a Web Design Course)

It is relatively simple to detect code copying, where two students have shared the same or similar code. Detecting other forms of plagiarism is much more complicated.

Detect code copying

There are a variety of code similarity analysis tools. We recommend using compare50, an open source project that runs locally and is similar in functionality to the more-famous closed-source frequently malfunctioning moss system.

To analyze code similarity of any assignment:

Assuming Python is already installed, install compare50 by running the following command on the command line: pip install -U compare50. See their documentation for further installation details.
Place all student submissions for an assignment into a single parent directory (note that this is how GitHub Classroom Assistant, which we recommend using, already organizes student submissions).
Place any given code into a sub-directory named given-code within this same parent directory.
Open a command line tool (i.e. Terminal on Mac or Git Bash or Windows Subsystem for Linux on Windows) and navigate into the parent directory.
Analyze the results by running python -m compare50 **/*.html -d given-code, where *.html can be changed to any filename you want to compare across submissions, such as python -m compare50 **/main.css -d given-code
compare50 will generate a results directory containing results as HTML web pages. Open the index.html page in a web browser to view results.
Click on any results to see the details of the analysis. Report any that look highly similar.