Aim/PurposeThe aim of this article is to develop a tool to detect plagiarism in real time amongst students being evaluated for learning in a computer-based assessment setting.Background Cheating or copying all or part of source code of a program is a serious concern to academic institutions. Many academic institutions apply a combination of policy driven and plagiarism detection approaches. These mechanisms are either proactive or reactive and focus on identifying, catching, and punishing those found to have cheated or plagiarized. To be more effective against plagiarism, mechanisms that detect cheating or colluding in real-time are desirable.