University Student Project Tracker (USPT)

University Student Project Tracker (USPT)

Abstract

Over the years, we have had complaints of people copying someone else’s project directly as his/her own. Therefore, this project is aimed at solving the problem of copyright as identified during seminar presentations, project defense, etc in schools. To solve the above-mentioned problem, this application is developed to capture relevant information of all project work undertaken and completed in the department. The application is an off-line tracking system; it will be installed on the user’s computer for use. The system will track projects by inputting some parameters of a new project to ascertain whether the work has been done by somebody especially from the Computer Science Department, University of Nigeria Nsukka (UNN). This system would help the supervisor to assign topics to students using recommendations from the previous project. Object-Oriented Analysis and Design (OOAD) methodology was used for the analysis and design while Java and MYSQL were used to implement in a Windows 7.

1.0 Introduction

Over the years, there have been several issues of students going to the departmental library to pick a copy of a project written by another person, not as a guide but to submit the same topic as a research proposal to his/her supervisor without the knowledge of the teacher or supervisor’s recommendation. When approved, the student goes ahead to copy word afterward as his/her own. And these are plagiarism which is against academic law. Therefore, this project will serve as a database for the department of computer science to checkmate this abnormality by students. To this end, this project is aimed at solving the problem of copying someone else project as his/her own as identified during a seminar presentation in the department of computer science. To solve this problem mentioned above, the monitoring software will be designed, to capture relevant information of all project works undertaken and completed in the department. This project will track students by querying the database, using text from the students’ research work through some parameters of the new project to ascertain whether the work has been done by somebody else. This system would help the supervisor to assign topics to students by the recommendation from the previous project. The University Student Project Tracker (USPT) will be designed using Java and MYSQL implemented in Windows 7. This USPT is a standalone application that will help to track the project work from the database through the search engine. In this case, the entire project undertaken and completed in the department will be stored for records purpose or referential purposes. The USPT is an off-line tracking system that will help to track the project work by comparing the proposed project with the one stored in the offline database.

The USPT will help the department of computer science to track project works, documents, assignments, and research papers. They can check the contents of a project’s originality before accepting or rejecting it. When a project is loaded in the USPT, it goes through its content to ascertain the percentage of text copied or the similarities with existing projects through the search engine.

1.1 Statement of the problem

Over the years, we have had complaints of people copying someone else’s project directly as his/her own. This has led to a lack of originality in several research, increased level of plagiarism, and laziness on the part of researchers.

References

Daniel Y. L. (2000): Introduction to Java Programming, Third Edition, Prentice-Hall, Inc. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, USA. Pp.5

Sun Microsystems, “Java Programming Language”, Student Guide, Sun Microsystems, Inc. 2008. Pp A6

Davies, P.B (2004): Database Systems, Third Edition, Palgrave Macmillan, UK. Pp. 33

Craig A., 2004. Notes on Plagiarism. Available online at http://www.lib.usm.edu/legacy/plag/whatisplag.php

Tom Pace.2002, The Effect of Plagiarism _ First-Year Composition. Available online at http://sites.jcu.edu/fycomp/pages/plagiarism/the-effects-of-plagiarism/

Mary D., Demand M., The Effect of Plagiarism on Students. Hearst Seattle Media, LLC. 2014. Available online at http://education.seattlepi.com/effect-plagiarism-students-1195.html

Heintze, Nevin. “Scalable document fingerprinting.” 1996 USENIX workshop on electronic commerce. Vol. 3. No. 1. 1996.

T. Hoad, and J. Zobel, “Methods for identifying versioned and plagiarized documents”, Journal of the American Society of Information Science and Technology. Vol 54, num 3, pp 203–215, 2003.