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I suspect that one of my students has downloaded his solution from the Internet as it is a very common basic task. The assignment was to write merging of sorted sequences into a single sorted sequence in C++. I would like to find the source of the plagiarism. (Just to be clear: comparing solutions inside the group is easy, that is not the task here.)

My daydream is that I paste the source code into some textarea, press the "Search" button and it displays similar source codes on the Internet. Is there any site like that?

Notinlist
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  • There was, but Google killed Code Search. EDIT: or maybe they didn't. They certainly *said* they were, but it's still there? :/ – Wooble Oct 11 '12 at 14:02
  • http://code.google.com/codesearch – Dmitry Ledentsov Oct 11 '12 at 14:06
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    I guess, plagiarism is a complex question. If you can interview your student and ask questions about each line and issue of the code, you can be sure, if he can answer your questions or at least can reason about the code, that it doesn't matter if he plagiarized id – Dmitry Ledentsov Oct 11 '12 at 14:09
  • @DmitryLedentsov Correct. I would like to present him the source of his plagiarism in advance. It is very annoying to argue with him, and I want to skip that step. :-) And also I'm not interested in if he can explain the code or not. I want him to be able to write it in an "offline" manner. – Notinlist Oct 11 '12 at 14:10
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    (I already know that he can explain the code, he demonstrated that many times. I haven't been convinced that he can write programs.) – Notinlist Oct 11 '12 at 14:12
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    You could search this website here for merge sort related questions near the deadline. – Kerrek SB Oct 11 '12 at 14:29

1 Answers1

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Sounds something like what turnitin.com is meant to do. The site is intended to catch plagiarism in english, but you could read up and see what it can do for you.

Syntactic Fructose
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