CHEATING IN COLLEGES

"Cheating is not endemic," says Johns Hopkins Dean Sigmund Suskind. "It's epidemic. My colleagues all over agree." Yale Dean Eva Balogh describes it as "rampant." At Lehigh University, a telephone poll shows that fully 47% of the students have cheated on exams, and at the University of Southern California, the student newspaper reports that as many as 40% have resorted to plagiarism.

Plainly, the military academies have lots of company when it comes to cheating. Educators agree that intense pressure for better grades is at least partly to blame. An ill-prepared student may panic and copy from a classmate during a test simply to pass. More often, it seems, the cheater is not the marginal student but the one with aspirations for graduate school or law school.

Is cheating more prevalent than ever at the nation's 3,055 colleges and universities? There is no annual tabulation to prove it, just a feeling among many administrators. Some cite America's moral climate as a fundamental reason for the phenomenon. Laments Suskind: "Watergate and its general milieu, American preoccupation with material goods, decreasing family values--they are all part of the problem. There is a morality problem in the external world and it's hard to wall off the university."

Stanford's President Richard Lyman offers a different explanation. "There is a much more diverse range of people in college nowadays," says he, "so it is more difficult to get conformity to any one standard."

Cheating practices are as varied as the causes. Yalies talk of the student--possibly mythical--who walked into the school print shop as exams were being run off, sat down on an inked galley and walked off with a set of test questions on the seat of his pants. Another student, totally unprepared for his exam in Chinese history, labeled

his blue book "Number Two," wrote a single grandiloquent concluding paragraph and handed it in. The professor later apologized for losing blue book "Number One" and gave the student a B. Less ingenious but far more prevalent are those who sneak "crib sheets" into exam rooms, furtively copy from classmates' papers or even, thanks to technological advances, use pocket-size tape recorders with earphones to play back lecture notes or important formulas. Then there are the pre-med students who sabotage classmates' lab experiments and law students who check out scarce reading material from school libraries for the duration of a course.

The most prevalent type of academic dishonesty, however, is plagiarism. As U.C.L.A. Dean of Students Byron H. Atkinson notes, plagiarism "has always been something in the scholarly ethic that transcends rape and murder." Harvard students talk of the undergraduate who made five copies of a friend's paper on "The Nature of War," used it unchanged in five courses ranging from Sociology to Morals, and got grades of A-toC-.

Augmenting these convenient sources, term-paper mills charge roughly $3 a page for reports on subjects from "Norman Mailer as a Descendant of James Fenimore Cooper" to "The Neurological Aspects of Schizophrenia." While states like Massachusetts, New York, Illinois and California have banned the sale of such papers under the mail-fraud laws or education codes, the mills are still grinding in almost all of them.

Many students deeply resent such practices. Says Radcliffe Bio-Chem Major Kathleen Sullivan: "It makes me furious when I see a cheater get a higher grade on a test than the students who don't." But there are also quite a few students who, if they protest at all, do so more on pragmatic than on moral grounds. By discouraging classmates from cheating, they protect their own grades.

College administrators have yet to agree on a disciplinary approach that effectively curtails cheating. Some schools, including Johns Hopkins, Barnard and Notre Dame have dropped student-run honor systems because they were not working effectively. At Hopkins it was students who voted to abolish the system. "They felt caught in a bind," says Dean Suskind. "They didn't want the cheating and they didn't want to play stool pigeon." Other colleges have had some success with honor systems. At Hamilton, only two students out of 950 were disciplined this year for honor code violations. To be sure, Hamilton faculty members are discouraged from giving take-home exams. Says Associate Dean Robin Kinnel: "We don't believe in creating a tempting situation."

Scores of other schools also retain honor systems, from Princeton and Stanford to Vanderbilt and Williams. Like West Point, the University of Virginia provides a single penalty for breaking the code--expulsion. But this "single sanction" system has an inherent problem: many infractions go unreported because of the severity of the punishment. A number of schools, with or without honor systems, punish first offenders with an F in the course. There seems to be a low rate of recidivism. "After their first experience," says U.C.L.A.'s Atkinson, "they are either truly shaken or they become cagier. We'd like to think it's the former."

Can cheating ever be stopped? Some academics argue that it cannot, as long as the emphasis on grades remains as strong as it is. Others maintain that it would even be more prevalent but for students' fear of getting caught.

Indeed, Marcus Raskin, co-director of Washington's radical Institute for Policy Studies, asserts that the competitive nature of the American educational system forces students to cheat if they want to keep up. Still, there is an answer to those who rationalize that "everybody does it." It was put eloquently by Stanford Department of Communication Chairman Lyle M. Nelson in his response to a student who had written him an apology for plagiarism. "Finally, what does it matter to you," the professor wrote, "if all other students cheat? Isn't there room for one honest person who says, 'But my standards won't permit me to do so'? What happens to a democratic form of society if all citizens say, 'I have no obligations to rules and standards of decency and honesty'?"

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