International Journal of
Information and Education Technology

Abstract

In recent years, plagiarism has become increasingly prevalent in programming courses. As a consequence, there is an enormous amount of research work in the area of preventing and detecting plagiarism. There is a number of tools that are available for automated detection of plagiarism. However, most of the cases must be reviewed by instructors to confirm the conclusions suggested by the tools. This is a labour intensive process which always requires too much time and effort from the instructors. More importantly, it must be highlighted that it is always possible for undetectable plagiarism to occur, no matter how sophisticated the tools available. In this paper, we propose an assessment design method that aims to prevent students from plagiarizing without deep understanding and to promote peer learning. We present our sample design and share some initial results in implementing the method in a programming course.