The paper examines a variety of articles that provide different approaches to plagiarism detection and prevention. The instructors of the programming study course at the Department of Software Engineering struggle with increased plagiarism attempts in students’ homework; therefore, reliable plagiarism identification approach is required. The research on the solution to this problem started from the very beginning – existing solution evaluation based on our multiple programming course assignment corpora. Various authors have proposed different approaches, so general code and whole assessment plagiarism metrics have been developed. The results of the present paper suggest that none of the studies managed to provide a plagiarism identification method or strategy that would address this issue. Further research will be focused on a complete solution to this problem – abstract syntax tree and source code meta-model generation, comparison and metric weight system development for assessment similarity estimation.