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Software reuse and plagiarism: a code of practice

Published: 06 July 2009 Publication History

Abstract

In general, university guidelines or policies on plagiarism are not sufficiently detailed to cope with the technical complexity of software. Software plagiarism can have a significant impact on a student's degree result, particularly in courses were there is a significant emphasis on large-scale projects. We argue that a policy for software reuse is the most explicit, and fair, way of overcoming this problem. In our policy, we specify the notion of software to cover all the documents that are generally built during the engineering of a software system -- analysis, requirements, validation, design, verification, implementation and tests. Examples are used to show acceptable and unacceptable forms of reuse, mostly at the design, testing and implementation stages. These examples are represented in Java, although they should be easily understood by anyone with software engineering experience. We conclude with a simple code of practice for reuse of software based on a file-level policy, combined with emphasis on re-using only what is rigorously verified.

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Cited By

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  • (2024)Newly Created Assignments and The First Repository Effect on Inter-Semester PlagiarismProceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3657604.3662043(211-220)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Influence of Personality Traits on Plagiarism Through Collusion in Programming AssignmentsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671121(143-153)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
  • (2021)Code Reuse and Formative Assessment in Secondary Education2021 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)10.1109/EDUCON46332.2021.9453994(1480-1488)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2021
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cover image ACM Conferences
ITiCSE '09: Proceedings of the 14th annual ACM SIGCSE conference on Innovation and technology in computer science education
July 2009
428 pages
ISBN:9781605583815
DOI:10.1145/1562877
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 06 July 2009

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Author Tags

  1. ethics
  2. plagiarism
  3. software re-use
  4. student projects
  5. testing

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ITiCSE '09 Paper Acceptance Rate 66 of 205 submissions, 32%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 552 of 1,613 submissions, 34%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Newly Created Assignments and The First Repository Effect on Inter-Semester PlagiarismProceedings of the Eleventh ACM Conference on Learning @ Scale10.1145/3657604.3662043(211-220)Online publication date: 9-Jul-2024
  • (2024)Influence of Personality Traits on Plagiarism Through Collusion in Programming AssignmentsProceedings of the 2024 ACM Conference on International Computing Education Research - Volume 110.1145/3632620.3671121(143-153)Online publication date: 12-Aug-2024
  • (2021)Code Reuse and Formative Assessment in Secondary Education2021 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON)10.1109/EDUCON46332.2021.9453994(1480-1488)Online publication date: 21-Apr-2021
  • (2020)Syntax Trees and Information Retrieval to Improve Code Similarity DetectionProceedings of the Twenty-Second Australasian Computing Education Conference10.1145/3373165.3373171(48-55)Online publication date: 3-Feb-2020
  • (2020)Identifying social networks of programmers using text mining for code similarity detectionProceedings of the 12th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Advances in Social Networks Analysis and Mining10.1109/ASONAM49781.2020.9381381(643-650)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2020
  • (2019)Plagiarism in Programming AssessmentsACM Transactions on Computing Education10.1145/337115620:1(1-28)Online publication date: 9-Dec-2019
  • (2019)Collaboration Versus CheatingProceedings of the 50th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education10.1145/3287324.3287443(1004-1010)Online publication date: 22-Feb-2019
  • (2015)Academic Integrity and Professional Integrity in Computing EducationProceedings of the 2015 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education10.1145/2729094.2742633(237-241)Online publication date: 22-Jun-2015
  • (2014)Beyond plagiarismComputers & Education10.5555/2753872.275390670:C(161-172)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2014
  • (2014)Student perceptions of the acceptability of various code-writing practicesProceedings of the 2014 conference on Innovation & technology in computer science education10.1145/2591708.2591755(105-110)Online publication date: 21-Jun-2014
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