Can anyone recommend any software to assist in plagarism detection in
Ada 95 programs?  We have around 200 students doing initial programming
courses each submitting 5 programming assignments (a few hundred lines
of code each) over the course of 2 semesters.

In the last two years plagarism has become a major problem.  Generally
the attempts to disguise the copying are not very sophisticated and
rarely go beyond altering comments and identifiers and changing the
order of declarations.

Occasionally a "pick and mix" strategy is used where students copy
subprograms selected randomly from several different sources. This is
typical in exercises of the form: given a package spec. for an ADT xxxx,
write and test a suitable package body.

Thanks
Alan Barnes

--
Dr. Alan Barnes, MInstP, FRAS
Lecturer in Computer Science
Computer Science          Telephone: +44 121 359 3611 Ext. 4663
Aston University          E-Mail:  [log in to unmask]
Aston Triangle            Fax:     +44 121 333 6215
Birmingham B4 7ET         WWW:     http://www.cs.aston.ac.uk/~barnesa
U. K.