PROGRAM CATCHES COPYCAT STUDENTS University of Virginia physics professor Louis Bloomfield has referred 122 students to the university's Honor Committee for alleged plagiarism after he scanned five semesters' worth of term papers using a computer program he wrote. "[The program] compares every possible pair of papers and it looks for every possible string of six words or more," he explained. Bloomfield devised the program after noticing repeated submissions of certain term papers for his introductory "How Things Work" course. With up to 500 students enrolled in the course each semester, Bloomfield's program had to scan more than 1800 papers. Bloomfield said about half of those papers the program detected had been copied in their entirety. Several of the students who will face the Honor Committee said their work may have been copied without their knowledge because they saved it on a PC in one of the university's open computer labs. The Honor Committee will review each case, with expulsion the penalty for those found guilty. (Wired News, 4 May 2001)