With a fourth of the cases investigated, the Honor Committee is making progress sorting through the staggering 122 honor charges that a physics professor filed against some of his students for allegedly cheating on term papers.
Committee Chairman Thomas Hall said the Committee already has investigated 30 accused students who were degree candidates or connected to degree candidates' cases before graduation in May.
During an investigation, counselors for the Committee gathered information about the case and presented it to an investigative panel consisting of three rotating Committee members.
The panel then decides to either drop the charges or accuse the student of an honor offense.
The Committee dropped 20 of those 30 cases after investigations determined there was not enough evidence to convict.
Of the 10 remaining cases, one degree candidate already has been dismissed from the University, following a June 30 honor trial.
The Committee decided to send the other nine cases that were connected to degree candidates to trial in the fall.
Hall said the Committee will continue to investigate 30 to 50 more cases this summer.
The Committee already has scheduled two more trials this fall.
"We don't want to drag this on," Hall said. "The trial docket is going to be full this fall, but we're still hoping to get the majority done by Christmas Break."
Christopher Scott, Committee vice-chairman for trials, agreed that investigations have kept Committee members busy since they returned to the University at the start of the summer school session in June.
The people involved in the cases generally have been cooperative, Scott said.
According to the Committee's constitution, students on trial are given the right to confront their accuser, which in these cases is Physics Prof. Louis Bloomfield.
Though Bloomfield already has testified at the first trial, the Committee will create a video taped testimony for future trials.
The taped testimony will make Bloomfield's statements "consistent from trial and trial and save him the pain of saying the same thing over again," Hall said.
The influx of honor cases occurred in May when Bloomfield charged 122 current and former students - including some who expected to graduate that month - with cheating on term papers.
Bloomfield, who teaches Physics 105 and 106, "How Things Work," developed a computer program in April to catch students who plagiarized large portions of their final papers.
Students in his classes have been required to submit their assignments and papers electronically since spring 1999.
Using the database of papers students submitted for the past five semesters, the computer program compared every essay for strings of six-word phrases that were exactly alike. Once found, the offending papers were printed out and the questionable portions underlined.
Bloomfield's system for catching the alleged honor violations has sparked debate about the honor code and how the Internet has aided and caught cheaters.
The honor cases have attracted international media attention, with newspaper articles and editorials published in journals as far away as London and Tokyo.
Hall said he has spent a lot of time talking to the media.
"The initial wave of coverage made it look like a negative story," he said. But more recent media attention such as an editorial in The Philadelphia Inquirer has been more positive, praising the University for taking a firm stand against cheating, he added. Bloomfield said he did not want to comment because of the ongoing investigation.
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