Catholic University Institute of
Buea (CUIB)
The Growth Mindset Entrepreneural University
SCHOOL OF INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY
An Online Assignment Submission and Plagiarism Check
Platform
Done by:
Yebi Steve Ngeka Lyonga
14SI-001673
stevelyonga@gmail.com
In
Partial Fulfilment for a Bachelor’s Degree in Information
Technology
In
The Department of Software Engineering
Mr Achankeng Peter
ACADEMIC SUPERVISOR
DECLARATION
I YEBI STEVE NGEKA LYONGA declare that I have not received any previous Academic
award or credit with this report from any other academic institution in the past. Neither is any
information included in the report falsified or manipulated.
Students Name
Yebi Steve Ngeka Lyonga.
Signature
Academic Supervisors Name
Mr Achankeng Peter
Signature
i
CERTIFICATION
I dedicate this report to my parents, who have put in so much both mentally and financially to make
sure I go through my degree program successfully. I also dedicate this project to other members in my
family who acted as my source of strength in times of depression. Above all, I dedicate this project to
the God who knows and sees all. As he was my greatest supervisor and friend throughout this period.
ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
To my parents, my siblings, my friends, my uncle and to my friends who were very much
supportive during this period, I say a big thank you and that I couldn’t have done it without all of
you. I also want to say a big thank you to Mr Achankeng Peter, my academic supervisor for his
patience in coaching me. I thank God for seeing me through in health wisdom and knowledge.
iii
Contents
DECLARATION ......................................................................................................................................................... i
CERTIFICATION ...................................................................................................................................................... ii
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT ....................................................................................................................................... iii
Abstract ........................................................................................................................................................................ vi
CHAPTER ONE ......................................................................................................................................................... 7
INTRODUCTION ................................................................................................................................................. 7
1.1 PROBLEM STATEMENT ...................................................................................................................... 9
1.1.1 STUDENT ISSUES……………………………………………………………………9
1.1.2 LECTURER ISSUES: ............................................................................................................................ 9
1.2 PRUPOSED SOLUTION ...................................................................................................................... 10
1.3 OBJECTIVES........................................................................................................................................... 11
CHAPTER TWO ..................................................................................................................................................... 12
LITERATURE REVIEW .................................................................................................................................. 12
2.1 RELATED WORK AND MOTIVATION ........................................................................................ 13
CHAPTER THREE ................................................................................................................................................. 16
METHODOLOGY ............................................................................................................................................. 16
3.1 SOFTWARE REQUIREMENT SPECIFICATION (SRS) ........................................................... 16
3.2 PROJECT PLAN ..................................................................................................................................... 18
3.3 ANALYSIS USE-CASE MODEL ...................................................................................................... 23
USE-CASE MODELS ....................................................................................................................................... 24
3.4 DESIGN ..................................................................................................................................................... 25
3.5 DATABASE DESIGN ........................................................................................................................... 27
CHAPTER FOUR ................................................................................................................................................... 29
IMPLEMENTATION ........................................................................................................................................ 29
4.1 The Online Assignment Platform......................................................................................................... 29
4.2 The Plagiarism Module .......................................................................................................................... 37
CHAPTER FIVE ..................................................................................................................................................... 41
ETHICAL PERCEPTION ................................................................................................................................ 41
5.1 Purpose/Objective.................................................................................................................................... 41
5.2 Brief description of research ................................................................................................................. 42
5.3 Aims/Objectives ....................................................................................................................................... 43
5.4 Ethical Analysis of Findings ................................................................................................................. 43
5.5 Conclusion................................................................................................................................................. 45
5.6 Recommendations ................................................................................................................................... 46
iv
CHAPTER SIX ........................................................................................................................................................ 47
RECOMMENDATION AND CONCLUSION ........................................................................................... 47
6.1 Challenges Faced ..................................................................................................................................... 47
6.2 Conclusion................................................................................................................................................. 48
6.3 Recommendation ..................................................................................................................................... 48
Table of abbreviations ................................................................................................................................... 48
Table of Figures
Figure 1: Plagiarism detection in different levels of difficulty ..................................................................... 14
Figure 2: Budget Estimate ..................................................................................................................................... 21
Figure 3: Gantt chart ............................................................................................................................................... 22
Figure 4: Pert Chart ................................................................................................................................................. 23
Figure 5: Use Case Model ..................................................................................................................................... 24
Figure 6: Activity Diagram ................................................................................................................................... 25
Figure 7: Class Diagram......................................................................................................................................... 26
Figure 8: Database Design ..................................................................................................................................... 27
Figure 9: Table of longest common subsequence ............................................................................................ 28
Figure 10: index page ............................................................................................................................................. 30
Figure 11: Signup form .......................................................................................................................................... 31
Figure 12: lecturer signup validation................................................................................................................... 32
Figure 13: Login form ............................................................................................................................................ 32
Figure 14: Login form validation ......................................................................................................................... 33
Figure 15: Lecturer page ........................................................................................................................................ 34
Figure 16: Create course form .............................................................................................................................. 34
Figure 17: Create assignment form...................................................................................................................... 35
Figure 18: Starting a lecturer session .................................................................................................................. 36
Figure 19: Looping through lecturer courses .................................................................................................... 36
Figure 20: Calling the fileTotext class ................................................................................................................ 37
Figure 21: Test documents..................................................................................................................................... 38
Figure 22: Plagiarism percentage check ............................................................................................................. 39
Figure 23: Percentage check result ...................................................................................................................... 40
v
Abstract
Online submission of assignments is not technology that started yesterday. As a matter of fact, it has
been around for more than 20years now. Systems in the past however came with limitations like the
inability to detect if documents submitted by students showed signs of plagiarism. At some point in
time a system did implement the plagiarism check but was based on programming assignments. On the
other hand, plagiarism check is technology that has been around since 1974. Existing systems however
have not exploited the most of what this two software put together can do. This project seeks to check
assignments of any sort submitted by students for plagiarism trends in a percentage format.
The project was carried out based on the Ajile Unified Process model.
vi
CHAPTER ONE
INTRODUCTION
On campus learning has been Cameroon’s system of education for many years now.
This system has worked quite well for decades, a result that is not strange as Cameroon has
always had as motto: “PIECE WORK FATHER LAND”. As such, people really did not
mind travelling several miles just for purpose of education as it was just a matter of getting
into a car or bus and in a couple of minutes you are in your school. This made online
submission of assignment almost an invalid option as it was always possible for a student
to get his or her assignment to the concerned lecturer without fear of harassment along the
way.
On the other hand lecturers that had a lot of students offering a particular course
had little or no choice but to give students undeserved grades as it was impossible to check
a bulk of hard copied assignment to find out those who had done the same write-up which
is in technical terms known as plagiarism. This issue made it difficult for lecturers to
differentiate weak students from strong students in terms of aspects like IQ and hard-work.
However, recent happenings in Cameroon has made off-campus learning an almost
inevitable option, if students must graduate from their different levels of studies at their
supposed time. While this off-campus system is not yet popular in many institutions as a
lot of people are still ignorant to “Android Generation Technology”, the Entrepreneurial
University of Buea, “Catholic University Institute of Buea” has implemented their own
system (cuib-cameroon.orc/ocr) which is a multipurpose platform, with support from
Google classroom, which is Google’s online learning plattform. Here students can submit
assignments and receive feedbacks from lecturers. Actually, I happen to be a student of
this prestigious institution. To me, the crisis has helped expand our knowledge to some
7
very useful pieces of technology abroad, given the fact that online submission of
assignment is technology that has been implemented in other nations without crisis. In fact
a research paper by “Khaleel Petrus and Michael Sankey” lays emphasis on the fact that
students have shown a lot of interests on electronic course materials and electronic
assignment submission. This paper is also so much concerned with the fact that Lecturers
are in a high state of decision making as to which assignment submission tools to use in
order to get the best assessment of student’s performance.
“The number of students enrolling in degree courses in UK universities has increased
substantially over the past few years, leading to large class sizes and increased student-staff
ratios. A specific problem arising from this concerns the substantial resources required to
manage the assessment of practical exercises, so that students receive accurate and timely
feedback which will benefit their progress. Automation of the assessment process is a
potential solution, facilitated by the ubiquity of Internet access and the relative affordability
of computing equipment.” (The University of Warwick). There are many systems which
were built to solve this issue, some of which were built specifically for institutions. This is
one of the reasons why Google came up with the “classroom technology”. But while the
classroom offers assistance with submission of assignments and feedbacks from both
lecturers and students, it has not considered one of lecturers’ most pertinent issues, which
is plagiarism. On the other hand, there is a section of the IT society that has taken
plagiarism check very much personal. Previous research has shown that since during the
90’s, there has been findings on document copy detection, which lead to the building of
many document copy detection systems, a few of which are: CHECK, COPS, SCAM, e.t.c
(NamOh Kang, Alexander Gelbukh, Sang Yong Han). This different systems tried to solve
this plagiarism issue using different tchniques. A more advanced system sprang forth
afterwards, which was the PPChecker (Plagiarism pattern checker), which uses some
complex logic to detect plagiarism in five ways, which are: Sentence copy exactly, Word
insertion, Word removal, Changing word, Changing sentence. There are a lot more recent
8
sites that do a diff check on two text documents. However, given the time scope for my
project delivery, it is not of sole interest to me to deliver a complete plagiarism, but to
archive an online assignment submission platform with a plagiarism check mechanism
incorporated in it, in order to assist students to submit their assignments and at the same
time help the lecturer catch plagiarized documents.
1.1 PROBLEM STATEMENT
1.1.1 STUDENT ISSUES:
I have the privilege of getting student’s issues with respect to offline submission of
assignments because I am as well a student.
 Submitting Assignments Offline is expensive:
Most at times , we are been asked to type our assignments and print afterwards,
sometimes we are even required to put them in folders so that they don’t get mixed up
and probably get missing. For those of us living by ourselves, finance becomes an issue
when we have to print about five assignments per week.
 Coming to school just to submit an assignment:
As a student, it is also very stressful to leave my home, especially if where I leave is far
from school just to go and submit a single assignment in school. It’s also expensive.
1.1.2 LECTURER ISSUES:
When the assignments become too many, there is a chance of getting to misplace a
student’s assignment.
Also, when a lecturer has to handle many students’ assignments, it become a challenge to
notice copies that are similar.
9
A few weeks ago, I can remember being involved in a short professional chat with my
lecturer when he said “I will love a system where students submit their assignments and it
checks for plagiarism and informs me. I almost referred him back to Google classroom,
which he is already familiar with when I remembered the classroom doesn’t check for
plagiarism. Before then, I had also been in the ENP lecturer’s office when a student
walked in to submit his assignment and when the lecturer collected it and read and he was
like “Who did you copy this assignment from?”. He recognized the document but
couldn’t remember who had submitted a similar document before.
Google class room helps solve the problem of lecturers misplacing student’s files but
does not help lecturers identify plagiarism.
1.2 PRUPOSED SOLUTION
My project seeks to solve these student and lecturer’s issues in one system. This solution
is based on a platform with a user interface that allows lecturers choose the courses they
are taking for a semester, student register/join a lecturer’s course and have access to the
assignments he shares on the course page. They will submit their assignments through the
course page and the lecturer will be able to see submitted assignments in the course page,
but this time during his session. Added to this is the background plagiarism check that
will be done and the teacher will be able to see files that are suspected for copy work, in
order to cross-check the identified files.
10
1.3 OBJECTIVES
The main objectives of this project are to build the plagiarism module, build the online
assessment module and then at the end put both modules together.
The sub objectives are;
 Brainstorm on requirements to execute the project.
 Separate my functional requirement from non-functional requirement.
 Identify different entities and attributes, together with their dependencies.
 Set up my programming environment.
 Build my database.
 Build my Graphical User Interface.
 Do much research on file handling and string comparison algorithms.
 Implement plagiarism test.
 Write the corresponding back end code for my GUI and link to the plagiarism
script.
 Write my project report accordingly.
 Submit and defend my report.
The next four chapters present past research on this topic followed by the software
methodology that this project was implemented based on and the implementation code
snippets.
11
CHAPTER TWO
LITERATURE REVIEW
“Availability of Internet and easy access to electronic texts makes it easy for many users
to share information and to create new documents. However, it also gives convenient
environment to malicious plagiarists. This is a serious problem for information sharing.
While it is not resolved it will make authors reluctant to share their documents and will
reduce the chances for the users to access valuable information” (NamOh Kang,1 Alexander
Gelbukh,2 SangYong Han 1+, Chung-Ang University, Korea, National Polytechnic Institute, Mexico).
This same
journal states the different intellectual property protection techniques that where
implemented to solve this problem, which are: copy prevention, signature and contentbased copy detection. However, content-based copy detection has proven to be the efficient
as it supports all sorts of digital documents in the internet since it is more concerned with
the contents in the document. In attempt to solve the copy right issue using the content
based detection system, there has been so many systems that have been developed, some
of which include: COPS, SCAM, CHECK, PPChecker (Plagiarism Pattern Checker) etc.
Prior to development of this systems, there has been a file comparison program released
for the UNIX operating system in 1974 called Diff. This program was implemented many
after in PHP by Kate Rose Morley, a programmer and was uploaded online in her website.
The program was built based on a mathematical concept called the “longest common
subsequence (LCS).
However, my project doesn’t only seek to implement the plagiarism checker application,
but also to build an online assignment submission platform which will run the plagiarism
check on student’s work. For many years now there have been many universities having
issues as to how students’ assignments are being handled and as a result are going in for
online systems for assessment and submission. This has saved a lot of inconveniences.
12
“The number of students enrolling in degree courses in UK universities has increased
substantially over the past few years, leading to large class sizes and increased studentstaff ratios. A specific problem arising from this concerns the substantial resources required
to manage the assessment of practical exercises, so that students receive accurate and
timely feedback which will benefit their progress. Automation of the assessment process
is a potential solution, facilitated by the ubiquity of Internet access and the relative
affordability of computing equipment” (Mike Joy, Nathan Griffiths and Russell Boyatt, University
of Warwick, United Kingdom, 2005).
Online assignment submission and assessment seems to be a much better option
especially with the rapid evolving methods of studying, like the mass of institutions that
are adopting the ubiquitous learning method. A couple of systems have been built to
support online assignment submission, like: “Moodle Online Assignment Submission and
Assessment which was built in the early 2000s for the University of Southern Queensland
(USQ), Google classroom which is a Google support for online studies and many others
including CUIB (the Catholic University Institute of Buea) academic online platform that
supports many student academic activities, including the submission of assignments.
2.1 RELATED WORK AND MOTIVATION
2.1.1 PPChecker
This journal presents the six levels of plagiarism analysis and their variants, which was a
scientific classification according to Karen Fuallam et al. The figure below describes this
pattern:
13
Figure 1: Plagiarism detection in different levels of difficulty
The figure above illustrates that it is easier to find an exact copy of the units such as
document, paragraph, or sentence than to find the subtle forms of them such as word
changes.
Different systems use either of these units as their standard to run a plagiarism check. For
example, the PPChecker journal contains research on the different units used by the
following systems: COPS uses sentences, SCAM uses words, and CHECK uses paragraphs
as a comparison. “Sentences form paragraphs or the whole document. Comparison of
sentences is a good metric to calculate local similarity. Karen Fullam’s research [7] also
shows that sentence is a good unit to extract plagiarism pattern information on query
document.” (NamOh Kang,1 Alexander Gelbukh,2 SangYong Han 1+, Chung-Ang University, Korea, National
Polytechnic Institute, Mexico.)
2.1.2 The BOSS Online Submission and Assessment System
BOSS is a tool for the assessment of programming assignments, which supports a variety
of assessment styles and strategies, and provides maximum support to both teachers and
students. Within this framework, the teacher has access to automatic tools to assist in the
assessment process, which can be used as much (or as little) as the teacher deems
appropriate. (Mike Joy, Nathan Griffiths and Russell Boyatt, University of Warwick, United Kingdom,
14
2005).
In the past years, the BOSS has undergone a series of upgrades. The boss has good
lecturer support and student support as well. It runs to two separate software modules,
one for the submission of student assignments and assessment by lecturers, and another
for checking for plagiarized documents, which is basically source code, as it is the main
objective of building the BOSS platform.
My project however seeks to solve the issue of plagiarism for the Catholic University
Institute of Buea. This project will be running a plagiarism check based on a sentence
match plagiarism pattern, on two student documents. Hence just like the BOSS platform,
this project will entail building two modules, one for the submission of assignments and
the other for running the plagiarism check. The difference is that the assignment
submission module will accept assignments on many different courses rather than just
programming assignments. The platform will be able to process text documents, word
documents as well as pdf documents.
15
CHAPTER THREE
METHODOLOGY
The development of my project was accomplished based on the Agile Unified
Process model, which is a member of the Unified process family. I chose this model
considering the fact that my project was somewhat complicated to me and since this project
allows for me to do the highest risk task first in order for me to have an early break point,
I decided to go for it. Also, since I wasn’t sure of meeting up with every deadline since
some stages looked far more time consuming than others, the agile unified process seemed
to be a good option for me, as it gives moderate attention to deadline emphasis, also bearing
in mind that there is a school deadline for submission of the project that cannot be
compromised.
3.1 SOFTWARE REQUIREMENT SPECIFICATION (SRS)
This section describes a clear picture of what is to be done to execute my project. My
project seeks to allow lecturers create classes/courses so that students can register for
them and then start receiving assignments and submitting their work in the same
platform. The system then runs a plagiarism check on the students’ work. With respect to
this information, I identified the following functional requirements, which were vital to
the proper functioning of the application;
Customers
This system will be used strictly by Lecturers and Students.
16
3.1.1 FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS
 A lecturer registers into system.
 A lecturer registers the course he/she will be taken.
 A lecturer posts assignments (files).
 A lecturer checks students’ work.
 A lecturer sends feedback.
 A student registers for course.
 A student reads assignment.
 A student submits his/her work.
 The system runs a plagiarism check on submitted files.
 The system alerts lecturer in case of plagiarism.
Conditions:
 Work submitted by a student must reflect that it is for a particular assignment.
 A student can take many courses and one course can be taken by many students.
 A student can submit more than one assignment and one assignment can be
submitted by more than one student.
 A lecturer can take more than one course but one course cannot be taken by more
than one lecturer.
Based on my functional requirements, I identified the following nonfunctional requirements;
Platform:
This software will be launched as a web-based application for a first release.
17
3.1.2 NON-FUNCTIONAL REQUIREMENTS
 The views should be easy to understand.
 Pages should load in less than 5 seconds.
 The database should be capable of holding massive data.
 The site must always be active and reliable.
3.1.3 TOOLS
 A Computer: I will use my laptop.
 A Browser: I will stick to Google chrome as it is widely used.
 A Webserver: I will be using XAMPP for windows.
 Framework: Bootstrap (for front end coding). If need be, I will make use of
html5, and some plane JavaScript and Ajax.
 PHP and MySQL: For backend coding.
 PhpMyadmin: To create my database for collection of data.
 Internet: For research and support.
 Software design tools.
3.2 PROJECT PLAN
For This section presents a description of how I plan to go about my project, taking into
consideration how it will cost for each phase and the key tasks that are to be performed and
the duration for each of these tasks. The cost analysis will be shown on a table while the
activity schedule will be shown by means of a Gantt chart and a PERT chart as well.
18
3.2.1 Cost Analysis and Estimation
The table below shows all the expenses needed for the successful completion of the
project. Considering the fact that the project is web based, implying much of the cost is
around development labor and hosting, since this project is a school activity, cost for
labor force will be exempted as well as cost for hosting, hence, the project will not be
costly per say.
19
COST ANALYSIS
ONLINE SUBMISSION PLATFORM
ACTIVITIES
Phase I: Research and
Development
1. Requirement
gathering.
i.
XAMPP
ii.
Sublime text
iii.
Definition of
project Scope.
iv.
Availability of
the technology.
v.
Internet
connection
Phase II: Design
1. Physical Design
2. Logical Design of
the
Phase III: Implementation
1. Front end coding
2. Back end coding
3. Plagiarism check
Phase IV: Testing
Phase V: Documentation
1. Writing of final year
report
2. Supervisor Review
3. Error correction
and printing
PER
UNIT
COST
NUMBER OF
UNITS
TOTAL
COST
50,000
50000
0
0
0
1
1
1
0
0
0
0
1
0
1000
50
50000
10,000
10,000
1
1
20,000
10,000
10,000
0
0
0
1
1
1
0
0
0
0
1
0
6,000
0
0
2000
1
3
0
6000
20
Total cost Estimate: 76000 Frs CFA
Figure 2: Budget Estimate
3.2.2 Project Schedule
I divided my work into some major tasks and assigned duration time to them, in other to
work in a particular fashion and in an orderly manner. The critical path in the Gantt chart
is not visible but the pert chart clearly shows the critical path in red arrows.
GANTT CHART
21
Figure 3: Gantt chart
PERT CHART
22
Figure 4: Pert Chart
The path in red indicates the critical path.
3.3 ANALYSIS USE-CASE MODEL
23
USE-CASE MODELS
Figure 5: Use Case Model
24
3.4 DESIGN
3.4.1 DYNAMIC MODEL
ACTIVITY DIAGRAM
Figure 6: Activity Diagram
25
3.4.2 STATIC MODEL
CLASS DIAGRAM
Figure 7: Class Diagram
26
3.5 DATABASE DESIGN
Figure 8: Database Design
The program running the plagiarism check was built using an already existing class (diff
class), created by Kate Morley - http://iamkate.com/. This class was built based on the
Longest Common Subsequence algorithm.
The longest common subsequence problem is a classic computer science problem, the
basis of data comparison programs such as the diff-utility, and has applications in
bioinformatics. It is also widely used by revision control systems, such as SVN and Git,
for reconciling multiple changes made to a revision-controlled collection of files.(
www.tutorialspoint.com) The figure below shows an example of the LCS table. This
table is populated using a strict set of rules. The two strings are MZJAWXU and
XMJYAUZ.
27
Figure 9: Table of longest common subsequence
The table above can be used to determine how similar both strings are. Each letter could
also represent a string. Kate Morley’s class gives the freedom for a user(another
programmer) to modify the functionality such that it can either compare whole lines or
single strings through a document depending on if it is set or not. However, this project
requires that the percentage of similarity of two documents should be gotten and also this
check should be done on not only text documents but other types of documents. To
satisfy this requirements, I modified the code in other to be able to get the percentage of
similarity and also used a fileTotext class downloaded from phpclasses.org to do a file
conversion in the diff class.
28
CHAPTER FOUR
IMPLEMENTATION
This chapter shows what was done practically in other to archive the expected results as
per my user requirement specification document. It shows to what extent I was able to
archive my results. All source code related to this project is in the CD that came with this
report.
4.1 The Online Assignment Platform
4.1.1 The index page
This is the first page the user sees when he/she enters the site.
The page includes a short guide on what each button does when clicked.
29
Figure 10: index page
4.1.2 The signup page
The sign up form allows a new user to register into the system either as a lecturer or a
student. The username field will take the student’s name and the password field will use
the student’s matricule so that if a student tries to sign up like a lecturer the system will
check if his/her matricule follows a lecturer matricule pattern.
30
Figure 11: Signup form
The matricule here for lecturers will be a standard pattern that will be provided to lecturers
The code snippet below shows some basic validation for a lecturer sign up such that to sign
up as a lecturer, a username should begin with a capital L, followed by a hyphen and then
digits. For example: L-1234. The validation for a student has not yet been done.
31
Figure 12: lecturer signup validation
4.1.3 The login form
This form shows two buttons, one for a lecturer who wants to login to the system and
another for a student who wants to login to the system. Either of the users must exist in the
data base. The form has been validated such that a student cannot login using the lecturer
login button and vice versa. The username field will take the student’s name and the
password field will use the student’s matricule.
Figure 13: Login form
32
The code snippet below shows the validation rules for the login form;
Figure 14: Login form validation
4.1.4 The Lecturer page
The lecturer page is only accessed when a lecturer logs into the system. In other words a
lecturer’s session must have been started.
33
Figure 15: Lecturer page
4.1.5 Create course form
This form allows a user to create a new course in order for the lecturer to be able to send
assignments for students in relation to the course.
Figure 16: Create course form
4.1.6 Create assignment form
This form allows a lecturer to post assignments for a particular course.
The student’s interfaces are yet to be created.
34
Figure 17: Create assignment form
The select field shows only courses created by a particular lecturer based on if the lecturer’s
session is on. It uses the lecturer’s ID to start his/her session, since it is unique.
35
Starting the session:
Figure 18: Starting a lecturer session
Using the session $Lid to get the lecturer’s courses
Figure 19: Looping through lecturer courses
Since the plagiarism check is supposed to run in the background, it doesn’t have an
interface as such. The classes used for this module were copied from developer’s pages
with their permission. All modifications were done by me with the help of my supervisor.
This section of the code is where the class is called that does the conversion of pdf and
word to text (The class was gotten from the internet) and two pdf files were initialised for
purpose of testing.
36
4.2 The Plagiarism Module
Figure 20: Calling the fileTotext class
Here are the documents used for testing. They contain short text so that just looking with
the eye is possible to predict how similar the documents could be, to be sure the algorithm
is working just fine.
37
Figure 21: Test documents
This section of the code was added by me with the help of my supervisor. It displays the
degree of document copy detection as a percentage.
38
Figure 22: Plagiarism percentage check
39
When a plagiarism check is ran on the two documents above, the following result is
obtained;
Figure 23: Percentage check result
There is a little more work to be done on the plagiarism software like indicating to the
lecturer lines that have been deleted or inserted or unchanged probably using different
colours to highlight but this work will be done when the student interface and functions are
ready, so that the system can display a number of students’ work that seem to have similar
content. (Not only two students, as more than two students might have similar content)
Generally, there is still work to be done but due to time constrain, it will be done as future
work.
40
CHAPTER FIVE
ETHICAL PERCEPTION
5.1 Purpose/Objective
The Catholic University Institute of Buea has one true vision, which is to bring up
a generation of professional servant leaders. As servant leaders, moral values should be our
prime character, so that while coming up with innovative ideas, we take into consideration
how it affects those around us and the population. The general idea behind the catholic
social teachings is to create awareness to individuals about the importance of seeing a
neighbor as important as they see their selves. Neighbors here could be a colleague at work,
someone moving along the road, a lecturer’s student, a student’s lecturer and so on.
Following the ideal reason behind the catholic social teachings, the church decided to break
down this ethical values into different key areas so as to ease understanding to those who
study it. Human beings were created in the image of the almighty God, implying that we
are all dignified creatures and hence should be treated with dignity. Also, one should be
able to take into consideration how his or her contribution to social life affects the
community as a whole, directly or indirectly. In other words, in whatever way man seeks
to invent or add up to the society a product or service, he should be able to take into
consideration the common good, as thought by the church. For example, it is more wicked
than good to produce a spray that kills rats but also poisons human beings in the process.
Moreover, God, who became Jesus Christ in his human form came to teach us how we
should leave on earth and one of the key things he showed us from time to time was the
importance of relating with everyone at every standard, both rich and poor,
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indiscriminately. That said, this chapter of my work shows how I related my project idea
to the principles of catholic social teaching.
5.2 Brief description of research
The world of today is one in which time is celebrated and so time has become proud
and expensive and as a result every individual, firms, institutions and industries turn to
look for the best possible way to manage time. Lecturers are becoming fed up with
receiving student’s homework in hard copy for reasons such as the risk of misplacing a
student’s work, it keeps the office disorganized and unnecessarily tight and other reasons.
Also, it is not very easy for a lecturer to notice when a two students have the same work.
Even if they recall a similar work somehow, it becomes a challenge to go through all
already marked works just to trace that copy, considering the fact that “time does not
respect speed breaks”.
Students on the other hand are tired of photocopying documents all the time and praying
rain does not catch up with them before they could arrive the lecturer’s office to submit
their assignments. There has been several attempts to solve these issues. All centered on
technology. While some schools have been able to build software that can accept student’s
work in softcopy such as the most popular provided by Google, the Google classroom,
other individuals and groups have been able to build software that runs a plagiarism check
on two documents, such as PPchecker and others.
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5.3 Aims/Objectives
The aim of my project is to use the knowledge I have acquired for the past years in
software engineering to build a web application for CUIB where students will be able to
submit their assignments and the system will be able to run a plagiarism check to make
sure two students do not have similar work, otherwise it will alert the lecturer in charge.
5.4 Ethical Analysis of Findings
As stated earlier in the introduction, this chapter of my project seeks to identify the
different principles of the catholic social teachings involved with my project and so the
subsequent subtopics represent those principles.
 Human Dignity
“In a world warped by materialism and declining respect for human life, the catholic
church proclaims that human life is sacred and that the dignity of the person is the
foundation of a moral vision for society.”
Catholic Charities Office for Social Justice.
William J. Byron makes us understand that the body of Catholic social teaching opens
with the human person, but it does not close there. He makes us understand that
individualism has no place in Catholic social thought. The principle of human dignity
gives the human person a claim on membership in a community, the human family.
The church makes us understand that every human being, be him black or white, poor or
rich, fat or slim is created in God’s image. In other words, we are a representation of our
father, each and every one of us and so we all deserve to achieve, we all deserve to live
our dreams, we all have a say as to what happens in our world, we all can create. For this
reason, the church tries its possible best to make sure that we, as God’s image, privileged
or non-privileged should be treated equally. On doing some research, I discovered a
document online that I picked out a phrase from that inspired me. It states that “Being in
the image of God, the human individual possesses the dignity of a person, who is not just
something, but someone.”
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Some students are just in school because their parents said so. This category of students
are very dangerous because they do not work hard to pass and so when assignment are
given in class they always turn to friends for help and when their friends share their work
and they submit, they will pass the assignments. The lecturer will barely notice
plagiarism. But the big issue is they come during the exams and cannot secure a pass
mark. When this happens, the lecturer in charge mostly takes the blame and in some
cases they are even sacked, especially when the student has influential parents. This
lecturer has a family at home to feed, but the student’s do not take this into consideration
because they have rich parents. This is against the catholic social teaching on human
dignity. My application comes to make sure this students are traced and called to order
before it is too late.
 Common Good
The catholic social teachings state that the human person is both sacred and social. “We
are one body; when one suffers, we all suffer”
_ _www.ccmke.org
“The common good refers to the social conditions that allow people to reach their full
human potential and to realize their human dignity” (“Summary,” p. 25). William J.
states in his book that the social conditions the bishops have in mind presuppose “respect
for the person,” “the social well-being and development of the group” and the
maintenance by public authority of “peace and security.” In a modern structure where all
nations act interdependently, the church seeks to put in place a mental structure that
promotes communication amongst nations in the development of the human family.
As part of the community of God’s creation, we have as much right to share in society’s
resources as we have the responsibility to share whatever we make out of the plentiful of
the society with the general society – the common good with others. This is a practice
that is not limited to our personal benefits, or our nation only. It should be extended to the
world as a whole. We are all brothers and sisters to one another.
Considering the fact that when a lecturer handles the work of so many students, he is
likely to misplace one or two student’s works, which will require that the student does the
assignment again or maybe the lecturer, rather than taking full responsibility gives the
student an average mark to cover up whereas the student was very much confident of
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having much more marks, I think my application is ideal for keeping all student’s work
such that every student gets what he deserves for the common good.
 Solidarity
Solidarity teaches us to love our neighbors as ourselves. It becomes difficult for a
teacher to show a student concern when he doesn’t know where the student is lacking. As
a lecturer, knowing students who are fund of doing copy works seems like a good place
to start in knowing which students are lagging behind. That way the lecturer can show
some love by calling the student for some counselling. Also, with students being aware
that there is a system put in place that runs plagiarism check on their work, they will
rather help their friends understand how to go about an assignment than give them their
work to reproduce. It is more loving to teach one how to catch fish than to keep giving
the person fish.
"Catholic social teaching proclaims that we are our brothers' and sisters' keepers, wherever
they live. We are one human family.... Learning to practice the virtue of solidarity means
learning that 'loving our neighbor' has global dimensions in an interdependent world"
(Reflections, p. 5).
“We are called by the principle of solidarity to take the parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke
10:29-37) to heart, and to express this understanding in how we are live and interact with
others, not as a matter of charity, but of justice. Solidarity makes it impossible for us to look
away from the injustice that our sisters and brothers experience.” (Caritas - Australia)
I came across a book that states that “Loving our neighbor has global dimensions in a
shrinking world.” It states that “At the core of the virtue of solidarity is the pursuit of justice
and peace.” And finally that “the gospel calls us to be “peacemakers” in a world wounded by
violence and conflict” I this quote is just a perfect inspiration to our nation, Cameroon.
5.5 Conclusion
Being part of the CUIB community is an experience I will never regret. It is only at the Catholic
University Institute of Buea where students are trained to be not only entrepreneurs, but
entrepreneurs with moral and ethical values. I cannot say writing this chapter of my project was
easy, as I had to incorporate my knowledge on entrepreneurship, with that of my field of studies
as well as my knowledge on the catholic social teaching, but as they say “nothing is impossible
with our creator”.
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5.6 Recommendations
I have just one recommendation, which is that the school should bring in another father to
the Buea campus to train senior year students on how to write chapter 6, or father, with
all due respect, should come once or twice to the Buea campus to enlighten the senior
year students on how to write the chapter 6 of their senior project.
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CHAPTER SIX
RECOMMENDATION AND CONCLUSION
6.1 Challenges Faced
This project happens to be my first real project since my freshman year in which I had to
apply all the software engineering principles to achieve my results. Since my sophomore
year, when we were being thought Web development, I spent much time on front end
design as it happened to be where I was more comfortable. I only started coding PHP this
year so it was quite challenging as I had to learn a lot of new things like;
 File handling
 Creating sessions and knowing their importance
 Using PHP code within HTML
 Working with multidimensional arrays using Key-Value pairs (Thanks to my
supervisor)
 Some new MySQLi functions like mysqli_insert_last() and others.
 I also learnt that a database does not save actual files but rather the files attributes.
There are a couple more things I got to learn in a very short time and so it was a little bit
much to take in. I also had challenges managing time, understanding the indebt of my
project, getting tools online to use for designing and a few other challenges.
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6.2 Conclusion
I am very much satisfied with the experience I gained this short period, even though I
have a long way to go. My supervisor was sometimes very provocative but it was for my
good. I’m not sure if I would have like to work with some supervisor other than my
supervisor. He was encouraging as much as he was chastising. I personally will like to
continue this project to see how it turns out to be and I will love to see it being used by
the institution.
6.3 Recommendation
My recommendations are for the student who will continue this work mainly in case I am
not around at the time.
When designing the student section of the submission, working with my supervisor, Mr
Achankeng will be a good idea as he is a specialist in web development and has a lot of
idea on what could make the system better.
The student should pay most attention to the design and have a good knowledge on how
the plagiarism check works and good knowledge on arrays and how to use loops.
The student should be able to search the internet for solutions and make use of w3school
materials as well as stack overflow and tutorials point materials.
The student also should have good knowledge on PHP as that was my main issue while
working on this project. It will save him or her a lot of time.
Table of abbreviations
ABBREVIATIONS
PHP
HTML
CSS
PPCHECKER
MYSQL
FULL MEANING
PHP Hyper Processor
Hypertext Mark-up Language
Cascading Style Sheet
Plagiarism Pattern checker
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