Automatic Grading and Plagiarism Detection Assignments grading represent a substantial share of the load of many lecturers. There have been many attempts to diminish this effort while keeping a good quality grading. The automation of project grading involves four processes: project submission, project grading, plagiarism detection and administrative work. Today, programming projects are submitted electronically at many universities. In some places the use of the network only avoids to handle a lot of paper and diskettes. But in other places it is associated to systems that automatically grade the assignments, store the grades in a database and inform both the instructor and students about the results. Some of these systems go further and they detect plagiarism. Plagiarism detection is always interesting, but with automatic grading it becomes mandatory, as the instructor will have little or no contact with projects. Automatic grading has different applications, the most obvious one is project grading, but it can also be used for assessment in electronic books or to evaluate student progress during lectures. This latter application is not yet used but we think it will be very important in the future. The lecturer will propose exercises during the lecture, students will solve them and exercises will be graded on the fly. A report will be submitted by the grading system to each student, with errors found in their exercises. The lecturer will receive a report with statistics about the exercises, most frequent errors, etc. Thus the lecturer will be able to know which topics have been understood, general misunderstandings, and how to reorient the lecture depending on the audience. In a near future, nobody could think about grading without the assistance of these systems.