The Honor Committee released statistics yesterday showing that more than half of the 148 honor charges filed by Physics Professor Louis Bloomfield last spring have been investigated.
"We're glad we're making substantive progress," Committee Chairman Thomas Hall said. "I think we'd like to move with better progress but we're making great strides right now."
Out of the 76 completed fact-finding investigations, 24 cases have been referred to trial and four of those cases have resulted in guilty verdicts. There are 15 cases now awaiting trial.
The original number of honor cases has risen from 122 in April to 148 in the past month, because of the necessity of going through each case and counting students more than once to determine if they played a role in more than one instance of cheating.
Bloomfield's charges, now internationally known, involved students in his Physics 105 and Physics 106 courses. Bloomfield designed a computer program to catch plagiarized papers by matching strings of phrases that were duplicated in separate papers.
Since then the University has attracted significant media attention regarding the honor system as well as Bloomfield's method of catching cheaters.
"I don't think [the honor cases] have affected the University's reputation," Faculty Senate Chairman-Elect Michael Smith said. "It's important for people to see that the University takes its honor system seriously."
In previous months, progress has been slow because of difficulties in contacting students who are abroad, as well as students unwilling to cooperate.
To deal with uncooperative students, Hall said registration blocks will be placed on them in an attempt to speed up the process and handle their cases. The Committee remains hopeful that such action will expedite the process in the next few months.
Ideally an honor case takes about two weeks to be investigated, but could take as long as four weeks depending on the number of people involved.
Since April, the cases have been processed in order of priority, beginning first with the class of 2001, whose cases have now been cleared from the system with one guilty verdict.
In the summer and fall, the Committee handled cases involving students who had a desire to have their cases handled, as well as students who were studying abroad.
The focus now is on cases involving fourth-year students, which would leave only a minority of second and third-year cases to be investigated.
"About 70 percent of the remaining [72] cases already have investigators assigned," Hall said. "We are optimistic about finishing all the investigations before Winter Break"
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