Professor traps the internet cheats

WASHINGTON - At first it was just rumours, but then one of the students came forward.

Cheating, she said ­ and not just one or two cases. She thought it was widespread.

And she was correct. But it took a computer program to reveal just how widespread the plagiarism was.

"It was a little more common than I had hoped," said Louis Bloomfield, professor of physics at the University of Virginia and the man who devised the program which identified that 120 students had apparently been cheating. "Taking somebody's work and copying it word for word amounts to academic fraud."

The scandal has rocked the University of Virginia, famous for its honour code ­ a student-run disciplinary system under which students swear an oath of honesty.

But it has also highlighted what is emerging as a growing problem at academic establishments across the US ­ one that has spread as a result of the internet.

Professor Bloomfield said whereas previously students swapped past papers and tests, the internet made it easier to copy and pass on such documents. "It was a practice made easier by the internet but now we are seeing technology is going the other way." Once notified of possible cheating, Professor Bloomfield wrote a program which identified similarities of six or more consecutive words in test papers submitted over the past five terms.

It took 50 hours to run all the tests ­ submitted by e-mail through the programme.

"Six consecutive words is actually quite a lot. Here there were instances of 1,000 words that were the same ­ whole chunks," added the professor.

It seems the problem is widespread. A survey last year covering 21 colleges found that 10 per cent of students admitted "borrowing" fragments of material from the internet, while five per cent "borrowed" large chunks or entire papers.

At the university of California, Berkeley, a micro-biology professor used a computer program to identify 45 plagiarists among 340 students.

Professor Don McCabe, of the Centre for Academic Integrity, said: "This is probably more of a problem in places where there are not honour systems in place.

"The internet has certainly made it more convenient. But I think the problem has been around for ever. I tend to think that the increase that it has led to has been modest."

The solution, said Professor McCabe, lay with faculties setting more original tests and not presenting the same questions year after year.

At Virginia, meanwhile, students accused of cheating will have to argue their case before a student panel. Some have already been asked to leave.

"Technology really is a double-edged sword," said Thomas Hall, student chairman of the honour committee. "The means for detecting cheating are catching up with the means for cheating."

- INDEPENDENT