Detecting Plagiarism in Microsoft Excel Assignments

We present a new anti-plagiarism tool called Excel-Smash. Whilst there are already anti-plagiarism tools available for essays and programming based submissions, our tool to the best of knowledge is the only tool designed to compare student submissions in the form of Microsoft Excel spreadsheets. We present details of the plagiarism checks performed and we test our software on over nine hundred current and past student submissions. We present a case study to show how Excel-Smash functions from the point of view of the user, and we present data to support the ability of Excel-Smash to identify plagiarism between different marker groups above the abilities of its human counterparts. With a low false positive and false negative result Excel-Smash quickly allows identification of serious and more minor inter-group plagiarism.