DOI: 10.5176/2251-2195_CSEIT19.151
Authors: Dr. Janet Liebenberg
Abstract: Plagiarism in university courses remains a matter of concern, but even more so for lecturers of programming courses. With the availability of smart technologies and the Internet, students can effortlessly access and disseminate program code. Several studies have been conducted regarding the plagiarism practices of computing students, factors influencing these practices and strategies for reducing cheating. Most studies seem to investigate views on plagiarism and focus on plagiarism in console programming environments. This study, therefore, aimed to investigate students’ views, as well as their actual behavior, regarding plagiarism, plagiarism methods and methods of disguising plagiarism in a GUI environment. The mixed method study of 266 students in a first-year GUI programming course found that 44.4% of these students admit to plagiarism and 59.4% admit to sharing their code. Students think that the most common method of plagiarism is copying a programming assignment and changing the code, but the actual most common method used by these students was using a photograph of the program and typing it out. Students provide the code to a fellow student by sending a photo through social media. The students believe that the most common way to disguise plagiarism is to change the program name, but most students reported they changed the variables' names when they disguised their cheating. Changing the layout of the interface was reported as the third most common way to disguise plagiarism by these students in the GUI programming course. The study's qualitative data revealed additional methods to obtain code and disguise plagiarism
Keywords: plagiarism; GUI programming; programming education
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