Volume CXXXIII, Number 12 December 7, 2001 f

J-Board: Plagiarizers take notice
JAMES FISHER
ORIENT STAFF

Preempting student temptations to plagiarize or cheat on exams during the final weeks of the semester, the Judicial Board reminded the student body last week that repercussions for academic dishonesty are consistently severe. Tara Talbot '02, Judicial Board Chair, wrote in an all-students email last week that " 'Panic' and 'ignorance' rarely, if ever, constitute mitigating circumstances in cases of academic dishonesty."

The message came two weeks before the beginning of final exams, "the time when," Talbot wrote, "academic pressures most tempt students to resort to…plagiarism, faulty citation, dual submission and other forms of cheating."

The Judicial Board heard just over a dozen cases of suspected academic dishonesty in each of the last two academic years. Board member Laura Hilburn '02 said that many of those cases involved students' misuse of the Internet as a research tool.

The Internet was "involved in almost all of the cases" last year, J-Board chair Tara Talbot '02 said. In the 2000-2001 academic year, the J-Board entertained eight plagiarism cases.

For some institutions of higher learning, the year has been clouded by debates over the juncture of academic dishonesty and technological tools. Faculty members are concerned that students find copying and pasting quotations, arguments, or whole papers so easy that the temptation not to cite or avoid such use is overwhelmingly strong.

Their fears have, in some cases, been grounded. At the University of Virginia, Louis Bloomfield, a physics professor, wrote a computer program to scan the 1800 papers he received in five semesters of teaching an introductory 'physics for poets' class. The program looked for duplications of strings of six words or more- indications that students had somehow copied other students' papers.

Bloomfield found well over a hundred papers in which 500 words or more repeated. He referred the cases to the University's Honor Committee, which expelled most of the students.

The Office of Student Affairs has considered subscribing to an online service, Turnitin.com, which offers to scan the Internet for text matching that in papers submitted by professors. But that decision has not yet been made, and administrators sounded skeptical that it will be, citing cost concerns as well as the danger that students might feel their professors mistrust them.

The University of Virginia's experience has reverberated on campuses across the nation. Haverford, a Quaker school in Pennsylvania famous for its honor code, published an article in its fall magazine on the subject. The author, Robert Boynton, a journalism professor at New York University, complained of the "Napsterization of knowledge- the notion that ideas… are little more than disembodied entities… available to be appropriated electronically in any way users wish."

From the Judicial Board's perspective, the Internet cuts both ways. Students and faculty alike realize that the simple act of plagiarism is now a few mouse clicks away. But some J-Board members noted that professors are finding out about Internet plagiarism just as easily as students are committing it. "Professors might type the first sentence of a paper into a search engine," said Hilburn.

Peter Schilling, director of Bowdoin's Educational Technology Center, said that the Internet can be a valuable research tool for students looking for a broad level of information on a topic. Talbot agreed. "Most students, including me, find themselves doing more research on the Internet," she said.

But Schilling noted that Internet searches often turn up vast amounts of potentially relevant material, and "there's more effort needed to winnow through it that students don't always make."