General
10 min
15,000 CS Submissions Test 3 Plagiarism Detection Algorithms
Code similarity tools all promise to catch cheaters, but their underlying algorithms differ dramatically. We ran a large-scale experiment—15,000 real CS1 Java submissions, 500 manually verified suspicious pairs—to compare winnowing (MOSS), AST hashing (JPlag-style), and fingerprinting side by side. The results expose which techniques survive renaming, refactoring, and template reuse, and why a layered approach matters for low false‑positive rates in production academic workflows.