More than a year and a half after Physics Prof. Louis Bloomfield initiated the 158-case plagiarism investigation that drew national attention to the University's honor system, committee members announced yesterday that the last of the resulting honor trials have been completed.
Of the 158 students whose cases were processed, 59 were formally accused of an honor offense. Twenty students, some of whom had graduated, were found guilty in trial, while the remaining 28 chose to forgo a hearing and withdraw from the University.
"The completion of the Bloomfield cases is a significant milestone for the honor system," Honor Committee Chairman Christopher Smith said.
The incident began in December of 2001, when a student in Bloomfield's Physics 105 and 106 "How Things Work" class met with him to complain about receiving a low grade on the course's final paper assignment. During their discussion, the students mentioned that others in the class had received higher grades by recycling the papers of past students.
The following April, Bloomfield wrote a computer program that would analyze six-word strings within the papers and report which ones were suspiciously similar.
At first, 122 students out of roughly 1,400 who had taken the course over the prior two years became suspects. That number grew to 158 as further computer analysis turned up more suspicious papers.
But a class policy allowing students to refer to old papers as examples led investigators to vindicate the original authors of the copied papers. This and other findings reduced the number of formal accusations to 59.
"The sheer volume of cases tested the ability of the honor system to efficiently process cases, and the honor system passed the test," Smith said. "It is stronger today than it was a decade ago."
Bloomfield agreed, saying that he was "immensely impressed with how [the Committee] handled the situation."
When the investigation caught the attention of the national media in May of 2001, it sparked widespread debate over the justice of a single-sanction honor code. Many opponents of the system argued that Bloomfield had gone out of his way to trap students in a system in which honor and integrity ought to be presumed.
Bloomfield said that while he "felt bad for the students convicted," the investigation was both fair and necessary.
"I can only give students this assignment in an honorable climate where they put education in front of trying to get good credentials," Bloomfield said. "But they broke the promise, or trust, that they agreed to when they came here."
The number of students found guilty of cheating represented approximately 2 percent of the total number of students whose papers were examined, a statistic which Smith calls compelling proof of the efficacy of the honor system.
"When compared with survey research which shows that roughly a third of college students admit to cheating, the 2 percent of U.Va. students found to have plagiarized in this class seems extremely small," Smith said.
Nevertheless, the incident represented what Smith estimated to be the typical caseload for about two years' work.
"It was a massive load that came as a shock to the system," said Duncan Brooks, the Committee's vice chairman for education. "I think the cases brought a lot of publicity, which is a good thing. It forces us to look at the system"
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