Last year, Eastern students violated plagiarism rules 71 times Student Judicial Affairs officer Keith Kohanzo said last week.

For a campus of over 10,000 students, 71 or about 0.7 percent of students have been caught plagiarizing the works of others.

Two assumptions can be made. The first, Eastern has incredibly honest students. And the second, Eastern’s faculty is unable to find more examples of plagiarism.

The answer is likely somewhere between of the two conclusions. A vast majority of Eastern’s students are honest and do their own work, just as Eastern’s faculty strives to prevent plagiarism to maintain academic integrity.

In an effort to increase Eastern’s ability to catch plagiarism, the university is currently testing a Web-based service called Turnitin. A professor submits a student’s paper to Turnitin’s Web site, www.turnitin.com, and the service searches a database of billions of pages for similarities. The service returns a color coded breakdown of the paper to show the professor what the student’s original work is and what’s plagiarized.

Previously, faculty members would have to search extensively on their own time to prove plagiarism through Internet search engines and their own knowledge.

Any step to increase the honesty of students in their work is a good step as long as it doesn’t divert funds from the classroom. The most important aspect to a university is a credible reputation. If a university doesn’t have credibility, it fails to provide a service to its students.

Eastern is a credible university and as such should continue to and further it’s abilities to ensure academic honesty from its students.

Students pay tuition and fees to Eastern to receive personal instruction from their professors, not just to stick their noses in some rented textbooks. This service can give faculty more time to dedicate to their students. This time can be spent to better instruct students on how to avoid plagiarism.

In the end, all of this will help improve Eastern’s reputation. It will be harder to question Eastern’s credibility when 0.7 percent of Eastern’s students are caught plagiarizing.