NYCPHP Meetup

[Christopher R. Merlo]

On Sunday, May 2, 2010, Justin Dearing <zippy1981 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> My understanding is many CS professors do this for programming homework. They are looking for exact matches. Apparently that catches a lot of people.

Actually, checking for exact matches won't catch the students who
change nothing but identifiers. But there's a really cool free tool
provided by someone at UC Berkeley called Moss that does some sort of
lexical analysis, along with pattern matching, that has helped me
catch lots of unscrupulous programming students. (Yes, lots. The rare
downside of teaching at a community college.)

> I think chopping up an article into an array of sentences, and throwing a few into google would be a good approach.

And that's more or less what I do when I suspect plagiarism in a
written assignment.  I don't (yet) do this in any automated way; only
when it seems obvious I should. Don't forget to surround the sentence
with quotes for Google to reduce the amount of false positives.
-c