As a teacher you often have to look at programming code. If you have a class with 100 students and they all decide to wait until the last day to send their programming assignment, you have a long day ahead. Unfortunately not all students are talented programmers, so they 'borrow' code from friends. Some are very clever and use multiple sources, but some even forget to change the student name in the header of the file. Checking all the files for this kind of activity can be very tiresome. So I decided to create a program that is smart enough to detect copy-paste behavior.

The program can detect the source of code, even if there are several 'donors' and detects suspicious patterns if you change your code just a little. It can display results in lists and in clouds, depending on the requested resultset. Because programming exercises are used several years it can handle old and new code files at the same time so you can even detect copies from earlier periods.

The project is in constant development to improve the detection rate and minimalize the manual validation process needed to verify a find. The program is written in Java, using Netbeans IDE.