Chips And Cheating

As long as there have been students, there have been cheaters.

In imperial China, academic dishonesty was so rampant that test administrators searched students for crib sheets, then separated them into isolated cubicles during civil service exams.

The punishment for cheating: death.

Repercussions today aren't so severe, but academic dishonesty persists--and new technology, from the Internet to personal digital assistants, makes cheating easier than ever. Just this spring, 130 students at the University of Virginia were accused of plagiarizing a physics term paper from the Internet.

Cheat sheets, once written on the palm of the hand, now can be stored on programmable graphing calculators and watches. Palm hand-helds beam test answers between students in class. And Internet term paper mills offer hundreds of pre-written papers for sale.

"The formats change, but the basic problem is the same," said Bernard Whitley, a psychology professor at Ball State University who studied cheating for the book "Academic Dishonesty: An Educator's Guide."

Although technology makes it easier to cheat, recent research suggests that gadgetry doesn't necessarily encourage academic dishonesty. It's simply easier for teachers and professors to catch those who do cheat.

Fighting technology with technology, instructors submit papers to anti-plagiarism software--sometimes before even reading them. One university went so far as to demand cell phone records to reveal who a student called before turning in a test.

Educators have caught hundreds of cheaters using such innovations, but they also have prematurely accused some students of academic dishonesty. Students' work was once assumed to be their own, but now students must prove as a matter of course that what they turn in really is theirs.

"It's not a situation of trust," said Lawrence Hinman, director of the Values Institute at the University of San Diego. "Societies that don't have that in the end can't flourish. . . . It erodes the fabric of trust between student and teacher."

Although a majority of high school students admit cheating at one time or another, technological advances such as the Internet have not had a significant effect on the overall number of cheaters. Of students who admitted to copying material from the Internet, only 6% had not previously plagiarized from written sources, according to a recent study conducted by Donald McCabe, a professor of organization management at Rutgers University.