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Comment on A System for Detecting Software Plagiarismparent

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Yes, MOSS does that.

I have been TA'ing a first year Python Programming course since beginning of this year; what you describe is the most common trick used by students---even though they have been told time and again that this will be detected.

As an example, MOSS picked up 91% similarity---between two students---for one of the module files.

  # Student 1
  at1 = input("Attempt 1:\n")
  at2 = input("Attempt 2:\n")
  at3 = input("Attempt 3:\n")
  maxi.append(max(eval(at1),eval(at2),eval(at3)))

  # Student 2
  attempt1 = input("Attempt 1:\n")
  attempt2 = input("Attempt 2:\n")
  attempt3 = input("Attempt 3:\n")
  maximums.append(max(eval(attempt1),eval(attempt2),eval(attempt3)))
I find it interesting that MOSS does a one-on-one comparison for each student.
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