An intelligent online assessment system for programming courses

Plagiarism is a common problem in education, and detecting it is a very difficult task if a marker is responsible for marking only some of the scripts. The situation becomes worse for distance learning as some students are allowed to submit assignments after the due dates and markers may have to mark assignments over quite a long period of time. They might forget ‘similar’ scripts that they marked some time before. This chapter introduces an integrated online assessment system for markers to detect plagiarism of program codes in a more structured, less computational and more flexible way. We propose a new algorithm using parse tree for detecting plagiarism of programming codes. The use of parse tree introduces a structured and systematic way for detecting similarities among computer programs. The assessment system provides multiple features to aid in the effective marking of assignments, such as plagiarism detection, automatic program testing and students performance statistics. The aim of these features is to relieve the burden of teaching staff and provide an alternative way to paper-based marking.