<p>Interesting article - but how true is this? Does anyone know anybody who do this?</p>
<p>CLEVELAND (OHIO) - WHEN Timothy Dodd became the associate dean for
undergraduate studies at prestigious Case Western Reserve University here in 1996, a crisis was shaking the American academic system to its roots.</p>
<p>'We were horrified to learn in the 1990s just how prevalent cheating was,' he says. </p>
<p>From Cleveland's University Circle in middle America, to the hallowed halls of Harvard in the East and the University of Southern California (USC) on the west coast and high schools around the country, cases were being uncovered of students doing whatever it took to get good grades.</p>
<p>Many cheat on exams, often with the help of new technology like palm computers and cellphones, and plagiarise term papers, increasingly from the Internet where there are websites dedicated to helping students cheat. The University of Maryland, for instance, caught 12 students using SMS on their cellphones to cheat. </p>
<p>Teachers at a high school in California's home of high-tech, Silicon Valley, last year found a student ring had stolen a teacher's computer password to get access to tests - and the answers to them, according to a recent article in People magazine.</p>
<p>Two years ago, a girl at a high school in New Hampshire was even caught using her home computer to scan report cards and change the grades for fees of US$25 (S$41) to $50, the magazine said. She was suspended.</p>
<p>Accurate figures about the number of students found cheating are hard to come by because schools traditionally keep investigations confidential.</p>
<p>An academic integrity board that Mr Dodd helped set up at Case three years ago to tackle the problem averages '12 to 13 cases a year', he said. </p>
<p>The Educational Testing Service which has conducted numerous surveys concludes that academic cheating has 'risen dramatically during the past 50 years'.</p>
<p>One of the most recent studies, a confidential survey of 12,000 teenagers by the Josephson Institute of Ethics in 2002, found that 74 per cent of students in high school confessed to cheating in an examination at least once that year.</p>
<p>That same year, a survey by Texas A&M University found that 80 per cent of its students admitted to cheating. </p>
<p>'It is sort of an 'elephant in the living room' issue on college campuses. Everyone from administrators, to faculty and students knows that cheating is taking place,' says Mr Brent M. Depperschmidt, 21, an economics senior at Kansas State University.</p>
<p>In one high profile case brought to light by ABC TV's 20/20 programme last year, former USC student Elena Martinez admitted accepting up to US$20,000 from Wal-Mart superstores heiress Elizabeth Paige Laurie.</p>
<p>In return, she wrote the papers and helped Ms Laurie, who spent most of her time at Hollywood clubs and Lakers games, prepare for tests that earned the playgirl a communications degree in May last year.</p>
<p>'Paige would come home late, talking about all the celebrities she'd met. I saw her study maybe once or twice. I never got less than a B for her,' Ms Martinez, 22, told People magazine last month. A week after the 20/20 show aired, the University of Missouri removed the heiress' name from its new US$75 million sports arena, which her parents had contributed to building.</p>
<p>Author David Callahan, whose book The Cheating Culture raised eyebrows across the country when it came out last year, offered a personal take on why the problem has mushroomed in recent decades in an interview with The Seattle Times.</p>
<p>He said he had been born in 1965 and was a member of a generation that came of age 'when nobody believed in anything besides their own financial well-being'.</p>
<p>But he added: 'That isn't the kind of America I want to live in.'</p>
<p>The man considered the foremost expert on academic cheating is Dr Don McCabe, who teaches at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He has surveyed more than 25,000 students at more than 75 colleges and universities in the US and Canada in the last 12 years. </p>
<p>'Students look around at what's going on in society, with all the problems we have with alcoholism, with drugs, with clergy abusing kids,' he said, in a telephone interview. </p>
<p>'With growing demands on their time, pressures to do well, pressures to get into the college of their parents' choice, they cheat, feeling it doesn't hurt anybody.'</p>
<p>The problem so concerned him that, in 1992, he helped to start the Centre For Academic Integrity to help identify and combat the problem from its headquarters at Duke University in North Carolina. Last month, it tapped Mr Dodd from Case to head up the centre.</p>
<p>Dr McCabe, a professor of management and global business, became interested in the problem when his son went to his own alma mater, Princeton, in 1990. He found that the honour code he once knew there seemed to have changed over 25 years.</p>
<p>'The attitude there seemed to be, if you see someone else cheating, don't look,' he said. </p>
<p>Dr McCabe, however, believes students are beginning to change for the better. </p>
<p>'There's an increasing number of students - still a minority - who really want to do something about this issue and who are tired of others who cheat,' he said. </p>
<p>'The bottom line is, you've got to involve students in whatever change you're going to make.'</p>
<p>Fortunately, some students are starting to feel the same way. Kansas State's Mr Depperschmidt is one of them and he believes that those who try to cheat the system should face the consequences. </p>
<p>He serves as a member of the board at the Centre for Academic Integrity. </p>
<p>'If you talk to students, they'll give you a wide range of reasons: time constraints, apathetic teachers, 'busy work', easy way out, self-apathy, bad example from current middle-aged generation, pressures to get ahead, pressures to get into grad school, peer pressure, parental pressure, the list could probably continue,' he says. </p>
<p>Of particular concern to him are disturbing studies that show cheating may not always be a crime without a victim, as most students who cheat seem to think. </p>
<p>They have found that the highest percentage of students who cheat are in the colleges of business administration and engineering.</p>
<p>'We entrust engineers to build the buildings we work in and the bridges we drive on and we entrust businessmen with our retirement accounts and savings,' says Mr Depperschmidt. </p>
<p>'If either of these fail, we could have deaths, as in the case of a failed bridge, or persons losing their entire savings, as in the case of the Enron scandal.'</p>