Click on honorable college student

Click on honorable college student
Will computers make honor codes obsolete?



By Dan Gilgoff


After snaring 122 potential term paper copycats in a computerized counterplagiarism campaign, you'd expect University of Virginia physics professor Louis Bloomfield to be disillusioned. But he's the definition of optimism: "We're looking at 1,800 students over five semesters, and half of the 122 probably copied off of the other half," he reckons. "So I think we could be proud of the 97 percent that didn't cheat."


Bloomfield is not alone. While the University of Virginia's plagiarism scandal grabbed headlines and triggered questions about the university's antebellum code of honor last week, some experts were insisting that Bloomfield's findings prove such codes work. "A similar search at a noncode school would have turned up higher numbers of cheaters," says Rutgers University management professor Donald McCabe, a leading authority on academic dishonesty. McCabe and honor code supporters say tra***ional college honor codes-with proctor-free exams and student contracts barring cheating, stealing, and lying-endow students with both privileges and responsibilities. "It means something to our students to be going to a school that trusts them," says Patricia Volp, dean of students at the College of William and Mary in Virginia, which has the country's oldest college honor code. "They're recruited with a disposition toward being honorable."


See no evil. But the University of Virginia's single-sanction system-those found guilty of cheating are expelled or stripped of degrees, no in-betweens-goes further than most such codes. Critics say that the penalty is so severe that students and professors are reluctant to snitch, and juries are reluctant to convict. "The penalties are so draconian," says University of California-Berkeley computer science professor Alex Aiken, "that there's a temptation to see no evil."


As the Internet makes cheating easier and more tempting, many professors are putting less faith in honor and more in fear. "Universities don't select students for their ethics. You have very smart people who are ethical and unethical," says Aiken, who invented a computer program that detects copied work and offers it gratis to college professors. He views harsh honor codes as vestiges of an age when student culprits were difficult to sniff out, a problem that died with the birth of the electronic age. Many college officials say professors are catching up to technology-savvy students. Indeed, as word about Bloomfield's computer program spread across UVA's campus, cheating in his class dried up almost entirely, according to a second computer analysis. Optimism aside, Bloomfield poses a formidable threat to swindlers: "The moment those students wrote their names on top of someone else's paper, they wrote their ticket out of the university."