By Dale McFeatters Computers perform numerous functions, not all of them benign, and one of those is cheating on college class work. Information can be appropriated wholesale over the Internet, even entire papers down loaded. A classmate's work can be copied instantaneously.
Plagiarism requires only a few mouse clicks.
The few studies done show that computeraided plagiarism is more common than college officials would like to think. On the order of 10 percent or so of students will own up to some cribbing. University of Virginia physics professor Lou Bloomfield produced dismaying evi dence that cheating may be prevalent even when there's little need to. The program looked for common phrases of six words or more among 1,500 papers and fingered 122 stu dents whose papers may have been plagia rized. There was almost no incentive to cheat except that temptation-prone stu dents could and computers made it easy.