A global tale of sin and redemption

Last month, Richard Barberio of SUNY College at Oneonta, N.Y., e-mailed AFT On Campus about something he read in this column in March, under the head-ing "Rooting out plagiarism":

"I thought that it might be worth noting that one of the Web sites highlighted...contains a potential conflict of interest. According to the Plagiarism Resource Center at the University of Virginia (plagiarism.phys.virginia.edu/), PlagiServe (http://www.plagiserve.com/), one of the free plagiarism Web sites listed in the box, also operates a Web-based paper mill that helps to perpetuate the problem of internet plagiarism! The irony is all too galling."

The Plagiarism Resource Center site offers further--and updated--illumination. University of Virginia physics professor Louis Bloomfield, who runs the resource center, tracked down the two creators of the paper mill who are also listed as the developers of two anti-plagiarism sites. They are Maksym Lytvyn and Oleksiy Shevchenko, two computer scientists living in Ukraine. When they created the paper mill Web site for an American client, they were aware that it was unethical. To make amends, they told Bloomfield, they then created the plagiarism detection sites and no longer have anything to do with the selling of term papers.

Bloomfield has come to trust the two, he says. "They deserve our support, not our condemnation."

A significant difference

Two Michigan State University economics professors have found a significant difference in the testing performance of students who took their principles of microeconomics course in a traditional classroom, in a "virtual" medium and in a hybrid of the two forms.

In courses offered in fall 2000 and spring 2001, professors Byron W. Brown and Carl E. Liedholm taught the course to more than 700 students, 363 in live, face-to-face classes; 258 in a hybrid course that combined live classes with a variety of interactive materials; and 89 in a virtual course.

They found that students who took the course online scored about six points lower than those who took the traditional class. This reflects a 10 percent poorer understanding of the material. Students in the hybrid class did better than students in the virtual class but not as well as the students in the traditional course.

To see "Can Web Courses Replace the Classroom in Principles of Microeconomics?" go to www.msu.edu/~brownb/vstudy.htm.