Detecting Similarity In Programs With Multiple Procedures Using Program Structure
Supervisor: Prof. Karen Bradshaw
In Computer Science classes that are not introductory courses and where more advanced programming is done, plagiarism is prevalent. To disguise the plagiarism students usually change variable names and add empty spaces or comments to the code, these changes affect the visual components of the program but they do not alter the program structure. This program structure is what I intend to use to check for similarity in source code. As a proof of concept, I will try to develop a system that creates internal representation of each program, in the form of an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST). This internal representation will then be compared to the ones of the other programs using graph comparison algorithms.