A System for Detecting Software Plagiarism

I took a brief peek at the paper cited by the article (<a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theory.stanford.edu&#x2F;~aiken&#x2F;publications&#x2F;papers&#x2F;sigmod03.pdf" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;theory.stanford.edu&#x2F;~aiken&#x2F;publications&#x2F;papers&#x2F;sigmod...</a>) to see how the system worked. It uses hashes of n-grams of the submitted programs to compare similarity.<p>My own experience with plagiarism came when teaching a university course for CS majors. For most, the class was their second course in programming. While grading an early programming assignment I noticed a program that reminded me of one of the early ones I had already graded. Comparing the two programs revealed that they were identical, except that the variable names had been changed to protect the guilty.<p>I wonder if this system would have detected this case of collaboration.

I wonder, can MOSS detect cross-language plagarism? For example, if a student is asked to submit an assignment in Python, what if they find a solution on the Internet in another language (e.g. Ruby), then translate it into Python? Assuming MOSS had a database of code samples taken from the Internet to compare against (containing the solution the student used), could it detect this?

we used moss once a few years ago while i was a ta. it was interesting. we actually found a few similar programs. we were also doing a 15min oral exam with the person&#x27;s code in front of us, so among the ones that has similar code, we were figuring out who wrote the original code, and who copied, etc.