SURVEILLANCE ACTIVITY FOR PREVENTING PLAGIARISM IN PROGRAMMING

Abstract

Plagiarism is a convenient way for students to accomplish assignments and projects since it is easy to copy and edit computer programs. Course instructors are facing serious problems in dealing with students who plagiarize programs especially when the number of students in the course is high. Among the proposed approach to handle this problem is by using automatic detection of plagiarism in programming projects. Prevention approach is conducted through monitoring of student programming activities. To address this problem, a surveillance system is proposed to record every programming activity. It is developed in an integrated development environment so that programming activity profile in Java format is created when students are developing their Java program. A non-intrusive and non-experimental setting approach is applied in which hidden data collection is conducted to observe students’ behavior in natural programming setting. Experimental study effect i.e. Hawthorne effect and effect of expectation on subject behavior is exploited as prevention of plagiarism. Surveillance system produces two file types: Activity log to keep programming activity log information and backup file to save the program writing record. The proposed programming activity surveillance system, DwiCoder presents a programming activity report at the end of each programming session. Students can assess their own progress in developing a program in these three activities: compilation, execution, and modification. The report is presented in a simple and meaningful way to encourage student spend their own time in programming activity. By using DwiCoder, student’s programming activity is continuously monitored and their behavior is under control.

Keywords

• programming activity profile
• behavior monitoring
• plagiarism prevention.