12 year-old's program kills plagiarism

A TWELVE year old kid has put the wind up countless Kiwi students by interesting their Universities in a little plagiarism program he wrote.

Nicholas Hinds, 12, who attends Otepopo School in the small town of Herbert, south of Oamaru has penned a program called Punching Plagiarism, which uses the internet search engine Google to detect if the contents of any assignment has been nicked from the Internet.

Nicholas told NZAP htat the project began last year, when his teacher Karolyn Jones heard that plagiarism was becoming a major problem at the big city universities.

The computer whiz kid developed a screenful of commands to generate the program. Meanwhile Massey University and the University of Otago are indicating that they are interested and want to evaluate it.

Unfortunately the program works so well that it netted one plagiarism suspect - step forward 12 year-old computer Whiz kid Nicholas Hinds. His teacher Frank Lewthwaite found Nicholas had apparently borrowed material from an internet site.

Write out a hundred times: "I must install code that makes my own plagiarism undetectable". µ