Design, Implementation and Deployment of PAIRwise

A. Knight, K. Almeroth, and B. Bimber
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5110

Increased access to the Internet has dramatically increased 
the sources from which students can deliberately or accidentally 
copy information.  This paper discusses our motivation to 
design, implement, and deploy an Internet based plagiarism 
detection system, called PAIRwise, to address this growing 
problem.  We give details as to how we detect plagiarism and 
the various development phases we went through before releasing 
PAIRwise as an open source software tool.  Our major conclusion 
is that it is possible to deploy an automated plagiarism system 
that is an effective, customizable, and affordable tool for 
investigating how plagiarism affects academic integrity.