Plagiarism and the Internet

Computers perform numerous functions, not all of them benign and one of those is cheating on college classwork.

Studies show that computer-aided plagiarism is more common than college officials would like to think. Last week, University of Virginia physics professor Lou Bloomfield produced dismaying evidence that cheating may be prevalent.

Alerted that some of his students might be plagiarizing for a required 1,500-word paper, Bloomfield designed a computer program to scan the papers that the students submit by e-mail. The program looked for common phrases of six words or more among 1,500 papers and fingered 122 students whose papers may have been plagiarized. In some cases, long passages were identical; in others, entire papers were identical.

Bloomfield's software and similar programs developed at other schools hold out the prospect that the same technology that enables students to become plagiarists will now enable their teachers to catch them.

Coincidentally, the UVA story broke a few days after Cliff K. Hillegass died at 83. Hillegass was the creator of Cliff's Notes, the synopses and study guides of books and plays that were vilified as "cheat sheets" when they first came out in 1958.

Critics said students would use the notes as intellectual shortcuts, skipping the original work and settling instead for a dumbed-down summary.

How innocent and dated that all seems now.

-- The Gainesville Sun, Florida, USA