[Scaevolus]

> "Then, we apply another filter, keeping only the cases that contain indisputable evidence — for example, hundreds of lines copied right down to the last whitespace error."

Sounds like they don't want to deal with plagiarism, if you can avoid it by simply making your copying "disputable".

MOSS is clever-- instead of doing direct textual comparison, you compare streams of tokens. This means that even if a student reformats the whitespace or renames all the variables (a common obfuscation technique), the same stream of "TOKEN ASSIGN_OP TOKEN LPAREN TOKEN COMMA TOKEN RPAREN" will exist. TMOSS extends this to snapshots of code as a student develops it, which is apparently 2x more effective!

This author also delicately avoids the cultural side to plagiarism-- many students come from backgrounds where "group work" is common, and passing classes is a communal effort, including homework. It's an unfortunately common mistake to think the grade is what matters, not the fundamental skill development.