CSC 379 SUM2008:Week 2, Group 1

Turn-it-in and MOSS

Protecting against plagiarism in academic work is important and many tools are available for instructors to use to verify students are not incorporating known works into their own without attribution. Turn-it-in for essays, and MOSS for software are two. Both require sending a copy of a student’s work to a central repository for it to be checked against the other works that the repository contains. The results are reported to the instructor and the student’s work is retained in the repository, adding to the body of work that future works will be checked against.

Examine the ethical considerations surrounding use of programs like Turn-it-in and MOSS.

• http://turnitin.com/static/plagiarism.html
• http://chronicle.com/free/2008/03/2250n.htm
• http://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/
• http://www.cse.nd.edu/~kwb/nsf-ufe/1110.pdf

What is MOSS

MOSS (Measure Of Software Similarity) is a system for determining the similarity of different programs. To date, the main application of MOSS has been in detecting plagiarism in programming classes. Since its development in 1994, Moss has been very effective in this role. The algorithm behind moss is a significant improvement over other cheating detection algorithms. The system was developed by (and resides at) Stanford. The algorithm is hidden to end users, meaning users must send the batch of code to Standford's server and wait for a response.

Supported Languages: C, C++, Java, C#, Python, Visual Basic, Javascript, FORTRAN, ML, Haskell, Lisp, Scheme, Pascal, Modula2, Ada, Perl, TCL, Matlab, VHDL, Verilog, Spice, MIPS assembly, a8086 assembly, a8086 assembly, MIPS assembly, HCL2

For more information on MOSS, visit Stanford's site at the following link: [1]

Ethical considerations

Student's work is stored in repository for every one to compare against. <starting point>