Authoritative numbers are hard to come by, but according to a 2002 confidential survey of 12,000 high school students, 74 percent admitted cheating on an examination at least once in the past year.

In a six-month investigation, Primetime traveled to colleges and high schools across the country to see how students are cheating, and why. The bottom line is not just that many students have more temptation — but they seem to have a whole new mindset.

The real world is terrible," Joe, a college student in the Northeast told Primetime's Charles Gibson. "People will take other people's materials and pass it on as theirs. I'm numb to it already. I'll cheat to get by."

Primetime heard the same refrain from many other students who cheat: that cheating in school is a dress rehearsal for life. They mentioned President Clinton's Monica Lewinsky scandal and financial scandals like the Enron case, as well as the inconsistencies of the court system.

Mary, a student at a large university in the South, said, "A lot of people think it's like you're not really there to learn anything. You're just learning to learn the system."

Michael Josephson, founder of the Josephson Institute for Ethics, the Los Angeles-based organization that conducted the 2002 survey, said students take their lead from adults.

"They're basically decent kids whose values are being totally corrupted by a world which is sanctioning stuff that even they know is wrong. But they can't understand why everybody allows it."

Even if the world were more ethical, students still have reasons for cheating. Some said they cheat because they're graded on a curve — so that their score is directly affected by how other students do.

The pressure for good grades is high. "Grades can determine your future, and if you fail this then you're not going on to college, you're going to work at McDonald's and live out of a car," said high school student Spike.

Others see it as a sort of moral relativity. Some students feel it is perfectly OK to cheat in some situations and in some courses.

"You'll have an engineer say, 'You know, what do I need to know about English literature? I shouldn't have to take this course,' " said Don McCabe, a professor who heads the center for academic integrity at Rutgers University in New Jersey.

For Mary's classmate Pam, it was a different sort of prioritizing. "You don't want to be a dork and study for eight hours a day. You want to go out and have fun."

And some professors make it easy, students said. They overlook even the most obvious instances.

In fact, McCabe says, a survey of more than 4,000 U.S. and Canadian schools revealed half of all faculty members admitted ignoring cheating at least once.

Students today also have more technologically sophisticated cheating options open to them:

A favorite device is the graphing calculator, which most professors allow students to bring into an exam … and into which students can download all kinds of material.

Cell phones — to take pictures of notes, or among the more wily, to text-message friends for answers.

Even a two-way pager can be used to cheat. For one student whose campus has wireless Internet access, he used it as a mini-computer to access the entire Internet during his test.

And then there are Internet-based clearing houses for term papers, such as Papers4Less, Cheathouse.com and Schoolsucks.com.

Fortunately, educators have technological options too. Schools have been subscribing to a service called Turnitin.com, which can help teachers compare students' papers to all the available literature in its database.

"It's typically 30 percent of all the papers submitted have significant levels of plagiarism," said John Barrie, founder of Turnitin.com.

"We need to promote integrity. We need to get students to understand why integrity is important — as opposed to policing dishonesty and then punishing that dishonesty. Because they can beat the system," McCabe said.

Josephson emphasized that college teaches students many things: how to learn, behave, overcome challenges, and succeed.

"And if they approach it honestly, they'll learn far more in college than they think they can," he said. "But more than that, they'll come out of it better, stronger people."

- From ABC News

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Seven in 10 students surveyed admitted cheating on a test at least once in the past year, and nearly half said they had done so more than once, according to the nonprofit Joseph & Edna Josephson Institute of Ethics.

"This data reveals a hole in the moral ozone," said Michael Josephson, founder and president of the Marina Del Rey-based organization.

Nearly one in six students said they had shown up for class drunk at least once in the past year. Sixty-eight percent admitted they hit someone because they were angry. Nearly half -47 percent-said they could get a gun if they wanted to.

Josephson stopped short of assigning blame to a particular group, but he said parents, teachers and coaches need to pay special attention because they have the most significant interactions with youngsters.

"I'm not saying there aren't some out there doing their best," he said. "But if all three were doing their best, we wouldn't have this problem."

- From CNN.com

Last winter, when some graduate business students at the University of Maryland at College Park accused classmates of cheating on a midterm exam, a group of professors decided to take matters into their own hands.

At the start of the final exam for "Principles of Accounting I," the team of professors who taught the popular course posted on its Web site an answer key loaded with false responses to the 30 multiple-choice questions. As some 400 students deliberated over their answers, the exam proctors sat and watched -- ignoring occasionally suspicious noises coming from a few cellphones, according to some of the test takers.

When the professors then compared each student's paper with the false key, they found that a dozen tests matched the fake answers almost exactly. According to Howard Frank, dean of the business school, there was only one reasonable explanation: 12 of the students had cheated.

The cellphone episode highlights what some professors and administrators say is a growing problem on their campuses:

In a recent survey, Jason Stephens, research assistant at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, found that about two-thirds of high-school students admit to at least minor cheating on quizzes and tests, and he estimates that college students are not far behind. While most students acknowledge that cheating is wrong, many find ways to justify subterfuge in their own work, he says.

"Technology further facilitates that sort of rationalization," he says. "Students can say, 'Why should I be forced to memorize a fact or a formula when I'm going to have this information at my fingertips online?'' By the time most students get to college, he argues, they have already used the Internet, if not portable devices, to cut corners on tests and assignments.

- From the Chronicle of Higher Education

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