SNITCH: a software tool for detecting cut and paste plagiarism

Plagiarism of material from the Internet is a widespread and growing problem. Computer science students, and those in other science and engineering courses, can sometimes get away with a “cut and paste” approach to assembling a paper in part because the expected style of technical writing is less expositional than in liberal arts courses. Detection of cut and paste plagiarism is timeconsuming when done by hand, and can be greatly aided by automated software tools. This paper reports on the design of a software tool called SNITCH that implements a fast and accurate plagiarism detection algorithm using the Google Web API. Issues related to plagiarism detection software are discussed and empirical results of a performance and accuracy study are presented. Categories and Subject Descriptors K.4.1 [Computing Milieux]: COMPUTERS AND EDUCATION – Public Policy Issues. H.3.3 [Information Systems]: INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL – Information Search and Retrieval. General Terms Algor...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2006
• Where: SIGCSE
• Authors: Sebastian Niezgoda, Thomas P. Way
• Keywords: Education, Paste Plagiarism, Plagiarism, Plagiarism Detection, SIGCSE 2006