CODEX
How to Detect Code Plagiarism
A short guide to using Stanford’s MOSS
When classes moved online in 2020, academic institutions across the country watched as the rate of cheating soared. It’s never fun dealing with plagiarism, but it is important to detect it, regardless of where we stand in the academic debate on how to best handle this type of cheating during a pandemic, as well as in general.
The best tool that helps you to do this for free is Stanford’s MOSS. This tutorial provides a quick route to setting it up, to help you hit the ground running.
Table of Contents:
- What is MOSS?
- How to register with MOSS
- How to set up MOSS on your computer
- How to check an assignment for plagiarism
- A note of caution
1. What is MOSS?
The name MOSS stands for Measure of Software Similarity. MOSS does exactly what its name says—it measures similarity between pairs of files from a list. You supply this list, and MOSS does the rest, and very effectively. When it finishes, it returns the results as a web page that you can examine.
MOSS uses a document fingerprinting algorithm called winnowing, which is robust to…
