My first thought was something like programatically doing a pairwise diff
of the files, 5500 times. I was surprised I couldn't find a utility that
just does this.

But i did find something called diffuse [1], that allows you to graphically
compare any number of text files in a diff-like fashion. This would
probably at least be able to tell you which files need closer scrutiny.

I think you'd presumably have to be able to extract the text from each
file; I doubt it would work on raw Word docs or PDFs, so that might be a
stopper.

It seems like the realm of source control has a lot of software designed to
help with this problem, so there might be other similar things out there.
But probably not anything designed to natively handle print-ready files.

-dre.


[1] http://diffuse.sourceforge.net/about.html

On Fri, Jan 23, 2015 at 7:26 AM, Judy Meirose <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> Can anyone recommend a plagiarism checking software besides Turnitin and
> SafeAssign?  I need to compare about 100 student assignments against each
> other to make sure they don't copy each other's assignments.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Judy K. Meirose
> Systems Librarian
> Florida Coastal School of Law
> 8787 Baypine Rd
> Jacksonville, FL
> (904)680-7603
>
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