Integrated assignment management system with plagiarism detection for programming courses

The introduction of web technology in course delivery in the Open University of Hong Kong has been demonstrated to be useful and effective. Students prefer to use electronic submission as it is a more secure and efficient way to submit assignments to the university. In this paper, we introduce an integrated assignment submission and management system to replace the traditional paper-and-pen work. The web-based assignment submission system allows students to submit programming assignments electronically, and to receive instant feedback about their submitted programs. The assignment management system provides multiple features to aid in the effective marking of assignments, such as plagiarism detection, automatic program testing, and student’s performance statistics. The aim of these features is to reduce the workloads of both markers and faculty staff while providing useful and timely feedback to students. A possible architecture for assignment management system is presented and the functionalities of the system such as plagiarism detection and automatic checking will be discussed and analysed in this paper.