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Candlelight
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Rebecca
Arrington
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| Sept.
11, the night of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center
in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., students,
faculty, staff and others filled the lower terraces of the Lawn
in front of Old Cabell Hall for about an hour starting at 8
p.m. to share their sorrow and comfort. |
Honor
System's credibility may be put on trial this fall
By
Dan Heuchert
What’s
black and white and read all over?
This
fall, it will be Monday editions of the Cavalier Daily. That’s
because Monday issues traditionally include the “honor black
box,” which discloses in simple declarative sentences the fate
of those accused of committing honor offenses. With the plagiarism
cases from physics professor Louis Bloomfield’s “How Things
Work” course having drawn international attention since the
news broke in May, members of the University community will be carefully
monitoring the outcomes of what will likely be an unprecedented
number of weekend honor trials this fall.
The
Honor Committee hopes to clear all 130 cases arising from the popular
physics course by the end of the fall semester, said Thomas Hall,
the committee chair. Through Aug. 1, 36 cases had been investigated,
with 25 dropped before trial, most commonly because those accused
were found to be unknowing “source papers” for the accused
plagiarists.
The
remaining 11 cases were sent to trial. Only one has been conducted,
resulting in a guilty verdict, according to statistics released
by the Honor Committee.
The
charges were filed late in the spring semester after Bloomfield
was informed by a student of possible cheating in his popular “How
Things Work” class. He created a computer program that would
allow him to check thousands of term papers submitted for the course
against each other for similarities, flagging papers which had identical
strings of words. Charges were eventually filed against 130 current
and former students.
Roughly
half are authors of papers thought to have been “source”
papers, Hall said. They are likely to be cleared in pre-trial investigations
unless there is some reason to believe they knowingly aided the
plagiarism, which is an honor offense, he said. Full
story.
U.S. News ranks U.Va. No. 2 this
year
Staff Report
The
University of Virginia is ranked the No. 2 public university and
21st among all national universities, public or private, in U.S.
News & World Report’s 2001 college rankings, published
Sept. 10.
Only
two other public universities are listed in the top 25: the University
of California-Berkeley at 20th and the University of Michigan, 25th.
Last year, U.Va. and Cal-Berkeley tied for the top public spot at
20th overall.
Though
the object of much controversy in educational circles, the U.S.
News rankings are widely read and cited.
According
to this year’s rankings, U.Va. has the highest graduation rate
of any public college or university and is ninth overall. In the
magazine’s listing of “great schools at great prices,”
U.Va. and the University of Missouri-Columbia are the top-ranked
public universities, tied at eighth overall with Dartmouth and MIT.
In calculating best values, U.S. News considers the cost of tuition
and need-based aid to out-of-state students, along with each institution’s
overall quality ranking. Full story.
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