According to The Crimson, a letter attained by the Harvard news outlet reveals what originally caused Prof. Matthew B. Platt to suspect there was cheating on his take-home final exam.
The scandal in the Government 1310 class led to Crimson basketball captains Kyle Casey and Brandyn Curry withdrawing from the university yesterday.
Originally, there were only thought to be 13 plagiarisms on the test, but upon further investigation, that number has jumped north to about 125 — constituting almost half of the 279-person class. The original group of 13 is reported to have been 2012 graduates and members of the baseball team.
An unusual answer to a bonus question and an odd typo — an unnecessary space in the number "22, 500" — lie at the root of suspicion.
“I am convinced that the similarities between these papers are not the product of chance,” Platt wrote in the May 14 letter.
