It may use something like Kolmogorov complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Compression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_comple

It may use something like Kolmogorov complexity https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Compression https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kolmogorov_complexity#Compress... ...where symbol matching is used along with variable names after removing all extra white space. Although, I'm guessing your university uses PMD : http://pmd.sourceforge.net http://pmd.sourceforge.net It's a fairly popular tool for detecting code issues (including copied segments).