How to check for plagiarism in C, C++ or C# (C-sharp) source code

Almost all computer science degrees teach students some language from the C-family of programming languages. These languages are well known, industry standard and very versatile, and thus a great addition to the skillset of any STEM student. The C programming language is often taught in low-level programming or data structure courses, whereas C++ is a great programming language for parallel programming, performance heavy tasks and gaming. Finally, C# (or C-sharp) is often taught as an introductory language or as part of a game development course in Unity.

With more and more students doing programming assignments in C, C++, C# or other C-family languages, it has become more important to maintain academic integrity in source code submissions too. Detecting plagiarism is important not just to avoid having plagiarised source code but also to encourage students to learn, practice and test their own programming skills by submitting original content. 

We see that teachers unfortunately often still have to skip checking for plagiarism, as it is simply impossible to manually check for plagiarism in student submissions in all the student submissions and using separate plagiarism checker tools is found to be too cumbersome. Having to manually copy and paste source code to another tool and manually parsing results often only increases an already huge workload of teachers. Because of this, teachers often do acknowledge the importance of detecting plagiarism, but simply lack the time to do so effectively. Want to also automatically grade your C# assignments? Click here to learn more about autograding C# code using unit tests!