Abstract:

In this paper the “Informatics applied to Engineering ” subject case is introduced. The subject is given in the first year of Industrial Engineering at Miguel Hernandez University. With the imminent arrival of Bologna plan and the ECTS, we have to rate the student performance out of the classroom. In consequence, it may be more convenient to monitor the individual work of each student, in his off-classroom credits. In our case, the individualistic work of each student is translated in a set of C/C++ practical sessions that must be presented to the teachers in order to be evaluated. In previous years we found a great problem with the evaluation system: students sent frequently plagiarized source code from other classmates, and the practices’ correction was a hard work. It is worth saying that we have approximately a total of 150 registered students in the subject. In order to solve this problem, we developed some years ago a Moodle pseudo-module that is able to detect plagiarized source code in the C/C++ practices after they have been sent to the platform. This module returns to the teacher a complete statistic about the number of detected copies, similar parts of the code, increase or decrease of the copies according to old practices, etc. The system is able to save a source code historical of the last years’ practices, which are compared with the new ones, in order to find some similarities.

Keywords:

plagiarism, innovation, moss, moodle, c++.