Purpose – The aim of this paper is to empirically investigate the information skills of undergraduate students at the University of Dhaka, Bangladesh. Design/methodology/approach – A questionnaire-based survey was administered to obtain data about undergraduates’ information skills. The questionnaire consisted of demographic information, computer and Internet experiences, and a set of ten questions relating to information skills. A total of 199 undergraduate students responded to the survey. Findings – The results indicate that undergraduates’ information skills were poor. Only a few of them were successful in answering some of the questions correctly. There are significant differences in information skills among respondents in terms of gender, age, possession of personal computers and computer and Internet experience. The main reasons for these differences and the general failure in answering the task questions correctly are mostly attributed to the absence of information literacy instruction within the university, lack of online information resources and inadequate information and communication technology facilities. Practical implications – The findings of this study will help universities in Bangladesh and other developing countries to develop appropriate information literacy instruction at undergraduate level. Originality/value – This is the first time an effort has been made to assess task-based information skills of undergraduate students in Bangladesh. The findings of this study will help universities in Bangladesh and elsewhere in the developing world to introduce information literacy instruction at undergraduate level.

A programming contest generally involves the host presenting a set of logical and mathematical problems to the contestants. The contestants are required to write computer programs that are capable of solving these problems. An online judge system is used to automate the judging procedure of the programs that are submitted by the users. Online judges are systems designed for the reliable evaluation of the source codes submitted by the users. Traditional online judging platforms are not ideally suitable for programming labs, as they do not support partial scoring and efficient detection of plagiarized codes. When considering this fact, in this paper, we present an online judging framework that is capable of automatic scoring of codes by detecting plagiarized contents and the level of accuracy of codes efficiently. Our system performs the detection of plagiarism by detecting fingerprints of programs and using the fingerprints to compare them instead of using the whole file. We used winnowing to select fingerprints among k-gram hash values of a source code, which was generated by the Rabin–Karp Algorithm. The proposed system is compared with the existing online judging platforms to show the superiority in terms of time efficiency, correctness, and feature availability. In addition, we evaluated our system by using large data sets and comparing the run time with MOSS, which is the widely used plagiarism detection technique.

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