JavaScript is a very popular scripting language that is being used in academic studies more and more due to the big increase in popularity of web applications. JavaScript is often taught during web development courses, together with one of the many hugely trendy frameworks like Angular, React or Vue.js (which we actually use ourselves for CodeGrade!). JavaScript together with Node.js is often used to teach networking or server programming. As JavaScript is one of the most in-demand and popular programming languages at this moment, it plays a big role in computer science studies too.
With more and more students using JavaScript for their programming assignments and projects, it has become more important to maintain academic integrity in JavaScript 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.
