"I get the sense that the professors screen things on their own, often do their own investigation," he says. "It's very traumatic for Faculty members to send things to the Ad Board because the penalties for students are so severe."

Hamilton also says that more plagiarism goes on than is actually reported.

"I'd say that I get suspicious at least once or twice each year," she says.

But the difficulty of confirming academic dishonesty means that plagiarism often goes unchallenged.

"I can speak for other TF's that there are a lot of times that ideas or even whole paragraphs look really suspicious," she says. "You know that something is from somewhere, but you just can't spend hours in the library looking for the book," she says.

Ingenious Disingenuity

Harvard is not elementary school, however, and writing a few facts and figures on their palm won't get students very far on the Ec 10 exam. Sophisticated classes give rise to sophisticated cheating, and past Harvard students have proven to be very devious.

An instructor who asked not to be identified says one student used a number of tricks to disguise a plagiarized article.

According to the instructor, the student moved material from footnotes into the main text, started the transcription in the middle of a paragraph, and omitted phrases that contained references to authors that the instructor knew the student wouldn't have read.

Finally, the student checked out from Hilles, Lamont and Widener every copy of the book from which the article was taken.

But the instructor was familiar with the article, recognized the plagiarized text and exposed the cheater.

Past students have also devised crafty ways to cheat on biology exams, requiring instructors in the department to introduce deterrents, says Professor William M. Gelbart, head tutor of the Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.

Gelbart says one recurring problem involves students who--dissatisfied with a exam grade--change answers on a corrected test and ask their instructor to take another look.

Students are permitted to ask for a "regrade," if they disagree with an exam grade, but changing answers for a regrade is cheating.

"We've suspected that some 're-grades' were of newly-introduced material," Gelbart says.