Seven U. Va. students expelled, four withdraw in wake of cheating scandal

As a result of allegations of plagiarism last April, seven students at the University of Virginia have been expelled and four students have left the school before they could go to trial, according to Thomas Hall, the chairman of the U.Va. student honor committee.

Louise Dudley, the director of university relations at U. Va., said a student spoke to physics professor Louis Bloomfield - who was teaching an introductory physics class - last spring and complained that many students in the class were not doing their own work.

In response to the student's complaints, Bloomfield "wrote a computer program that compared the students' work . . . to look for identical passages of words," Dudley said. Bloomfield used this program to examine papers for the course from the spring semester and from four previous semesters, she said.

In April, Bloomfield accused 122 students of plagiarism, according to Hall. This number increased to 148 after Bloomfield "refined his program," Hall said in an e-mail.

The accused are gradually being tried before the student honor committee. The trial process has been slow because the committee is "looking at the circumstances for each one case by case," Dudley said. The defendants are tried before a jury of students in trials that are usually closed to the public, according to Hall.

U. Va. has a single-sanction honor code - the only punishment for an honor infraction is dismissal from the university, Hall said.

Seven students have been expelled of the eight that have been tried, according to Hall. He added that "four other students have left the university admitting guilt, essentially waiving their right to a trial."

Hall said that there have never previously been allegations of cheating on such a large scale on the Charlottesville grounds. "Nothing like this has happened before at U. Va.," he said.