Investigating the Understanding of Plagiarism: A Case Study of Code Plagiarism in China

Plagiarism is a matter of great concern in academic. Especially, colleges and universities which involve homework, exams, credits and degrees, are the hardest hit area for plagiarism. Although it is a common sense about plagiarism for teachers and students that plagiarism is forbidden, a blurred boundary line is always there when plagiarism happens in real cases. In computer science, the problem is more severe as the definition of code plagiarism is more ambiguous and difficult than the text plagiarism. The assignments and projects for computer science students include not only documents, but also codes, which contain variables, functions, comments etc. This research is a case study on the code plagiarism in a programming course. Questionnaires were conducted to get general ideas about code plagiarism from several universities in China. The problems of code plagiarism are discussed in this study. Some thoughts are raised on the measure of the code plagiarism and the strategies from management point of view.