How to check for plagiarism in Java source code

Many teachers choose to teach their students the Java programming language. It is a great foundation for any computer science or software engineering studies and one of the most popular and versatile languages. It serves as a great language to introduce students to Object Oriented Programming and a strongly typed language. But also more advanced courses in mobile application development, big data or enterprise software engineering often use Java, teaching tools such as Android Studio and Kotlin for app development and Apache Hadoop in big data and distributed computing courses.

With more and more students doing their assignments in Java, it has become more important to maintain academic integrity in the Java source code 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.