Snitch

Plagiarism of material from the Internet is a widespread and growing problem. Computer science students, and those in other science and engineering courses, can sometimes get away with a "cut and paste" approach to assembling a paper in part because the expected style of technical writing is less expositional than in liberal arts courses. Detection of cut and paste plagiarism is time-consuming when done by hand, and can be greatly aided by automated software tools. This paper reports on the design of a software tool called SNITCH that implements a fast and accurate plagiarism detection algorithm using the Google Web API. Issues related to plagiarism detection software are discussed and empirical results of a performance and accuracy study are presented.