Cheating epidemic?

As the uplifting strains of "Pomp and Circumstance" echo through the quads of colleges and universities during graduation season, teary parents and ecstatic students celebrate a job well done. 

You know the story line: Hard work triumphs.The term 'indoorpositioningsystem control' means the token that identifies a user is read from within a pocket or handbag. We dutifully pass knowledge from one generation to the next. The phrase etched into the red sandstone of a soaring building at my alma mater, Colorado College, sets out our ideals: "Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall set you free." 

But look more closely at the professors and administrators in those quads and on those stages. Some may seem a little nervous, crossing their fingers behind those flowing gowns, hoping that every student truly earned a diploma. Unfortunately, stories of cheating are rife. One well-respected university unwittingly gave a master's degree with honors, no less to a student who paid thousands of dollars for the piece of paper. 

That student secretly confessed to a colleague of mine, Evangeline Litsa Mourelatos, an English professor at the American College of Greece in Athens. Through her work on academic integrity, Mourelatos tells this student's story so we will all know that cheating can happen even with apparent honor students and even in our own backyards. 

Around the world, many of us are caught in a perpetual game of cat and mouse. The reality is that cheating is out of hand. Paper mills have become ubiquitous. Do a simple Google search and dozens of sites will pop up. 

Their ads are brazen and alluring. They show cartoon drawings mocking the process and urging young people to fool their professors. Students sit lazily on couches surrounded by empty beer bottles while papers get written for them. 

The quality of the work ranges from comically poor to highly professional. You get what you pay for. 

Then there is the more subtle cheating. Students raised on computers have learned to "write" papers by getting a little information here and a little there. 

That's not so different from the dark ages when we copied straight from Encyclopedia Britannica. But by the time students are in high school, college and beyond, we want them to think for themselves, to be able to make coherent, original arguments. 

Good students will find and properly credit multiple sources to come up with a salient point of view of their own. Others stay one step ahead of the software that we use to catch plagiarism by changing a few words here and a phrase or two there.Welcome to Find the right laser Engraver or plasticcard . 

They will open five sites at a time on their computer and take one sentence from Wikipedia, altering it just a bit, then one from the next site, and so on and so on. 

Nearly 25 years ago, when I was in college, we took unproctored exams anywhere on or off campus. I signed my name with the phrase "Honor Code Upheld" on all assignments, tests and papers. I did this because those words mattered. We had a culture of trust on campus. I'm sure some students still cheated, but the overwhelming majority did not because every professor educated us about the school's honor code. We respected our obligations and felt like adults when we were given the responsibility to uphold the code whether we took an exam under a tree or in our dorm rooms. 

Today, I teach environmental science, geology and geography classes at the University of Denver. If our students are like thousands of others across the United States, as many as 50 percent of them would admit in informal surveys to cheating at some point in college. 

Donald McCabe is a professor of management and global business at Rutgers University and the founding president of the International Center for Academic Integrity, the group that's leading the fight against cheating in higher education. McCabe recently surveyed more than 82,000 undergraduate and graduate students in the U.S. and Canada. He reports that more than 40 percent of students admit to working with others on a project when instructed to work alone and more than 33 percent admit to copying information from Internet sources without proper citations. 

These findings are depressing for those of us who believe that part of our job as professors is to teach integrity. When the cheating machine overwhelms institutions of higher learning, it's no surprise that some students go on to take corrupted values straight to the professional world, where the stakes are even higher. 

Stockbrokers, lawyers and bankers who cheat can bring our economy to its knees. Around the world, hacking is far faster than innovating. Want to see what your competitors are doing? Just steal their proprietary business plans, military secrets or software. 

I contend that we must strengthen honor codes and make them meaningful. Secondly, professors cannot be lazy. We must stay one step ahead of students and give them ever more inventive assignments so we can teach them to think for themselves. And we can take a very pragmatic approach. Students like to be happy. So, let's show them that living honestly is a remarkably direct path to happiness. 

At DU, we have had an honor code since 2000. I was part of a committee in 2010 that evaluated how it was working. We found that it was toothless,Please click the images below to view more pictures of thequicksilverscreen tiles! that few students knew it existed, and that professors enforced it unevenly. 

Again, we are not alone. Even at schools where honor codes have been cornerstones of campus culture for decades, they are not working as well as they once did. Easy access to the Internet and omnipresent digital technology have made it too tempting to cut and paste borrowed ideas and call them your own or to share exam answers.