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Cheating Made Easy
jefu writes "This NY Times story talks about the kinds of papers that students might find (and buy) on the web. It also mentions turnitin.com a site that will scan papers and attempt to determine if it was copied. The article uses 'The Great Gatsby' as an example and notes that for the time it takes to read the book and write a paper, buying a paper seems a poor tradeoff. However, many books (or required papers) involve much more work on the part of the student, so the question becomes that much more difficult. If you have to do a report on 'Ulysses' it takes a bit more than a few hours just to read the book - let along understand enough to do a reasonable paper on it."
When getting good grades is more important than actually understanding the subject.
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I use Sparknotes.com often and it really helps you understand books and better prepare for tests. I also use myBiblio for bibliographies which works pretty well too. tutors arent consideredd cheating so why should study aids?
I have also seen sites that advertise (for greater expense) to write papers individually for you. These (if they are individually written) will NOT be caught by any technical means. Its still down to the professor/lecturer to make a judgment based on the persons grades.
Then all you have to do is read and understand the the paper you bought. Seems like this would be a lot easier than reading the entire book and doing an original paper.
My wife teaches at a university, and each year many of the first essay assignments she sets are copied straight off the internet, maybe with a bit of cut'n'pasting but often just a straight copy. We spend half an hour Googling phrases that the students were unlikely to have written (look for the long words!) and i'll bet we find 9 out of 10 sources. A written warning and a lecture from the head of studies and the problem is solved until the next year. Maybe 1 in 10 are smart enough to cover their sources so we can't prove they cheated, but, hey, that almost counts as research... ;-)
If universities are concerned about cheating, they should give more weight to exams, where it is harder to cheat.
Exams alone put too much weight on memorization and performance under pressure, rather than research and long-term thought.
Therefore, tell people ahead of time what the broad area is, though not the specific topic. Let them bring in a few pages of notes, but those notes have to be submitted with the exam.
The ONE thing that really pissed me off about turnitin.com is that it gives your paper a "rating" on how many quotations you have, how common those quotes are, how many "similar" papers have been turned in etc, and it send the teacher a report that basically says whether your paper has a "green," good rating, eg you PROBABLY didn't cheat or improperly cite something, or "red," if it thinks you're cheatting.
Can someone tell me how a "green" to "red" rating can really tell a teacher whether or not you're cheatting. Its impossible to get a "green" rating, unless by chance you write something so unique, so original that no one has ever done anything even slightly similar to it. Has anyone ever heard of paraphrasing? Do you have any idea how easy it is to take someone elses work, change the sentance structure here and there and then turn in what appears to be an original piece?
Better than that, many of my classmates have found ways to completely fool the site by placing huge chuncks of their papers in quotations, when submitting to the site, and then removing them when they turn in the printed copy to the teacher.
I do not know much about term papers and other things like that in English, but in Russian there are thousands of them in the Internet. For free.
Hordes of students are downloading them in huge amounts that allows the site owners to sell not papers themself, but advertisement only. How do they get it ? Easily. Students nowadays are writing they papers using computers, so it is not a problem to share their work. Also some sites provides more detailed information - the name of the college(s) and of the professor(s) where the paper appeared, and grades it received.
It is a big trouble indeed. I do not have a diploma myself, but when I am in duty of interviewing young people looking for a job, I can not trust their diploma.
However, these papers have a lot of useful information that could be used.
several of the teachers subscribed to a lot of the websites where you can buy term papers and reports.
While this doesn't stop the people who pay to have one written for them, or the ones who do a fair amount of tailoring their "store-bought" essays, it at least helps eliminate the stupid cheaters.
I actually enjoy reading, so in my opinion, it's a waste of time and money to buy your reports when you learn so much more by doing it yourself. Not to mention the fact that you know you earned your grade honestly.
I actually feel sorry for the people who short themselves by not doing the work themselves.
Mod points are pointless when you browse at -1.
...the importance of college. Middle American society is now at a state where college doesn't mean anything over just having completed some education. My college sociology class (jeez, that was 6 years ago now) touched on the phenomenon of credential inflation, wherein baccalaureate degrees become increasingly meaningless because everyone's got one.
Really, the glut of colleges in the US makes attending one the duty of anyone who wants a decent job. Students go to college out of a perceived need for the result, so small wonder that most of them want to do as little as possible in their time there.
In one sense it mimics the situation in east Asia where companies will hire any student who's gone through a good college; once you make it there, it behooves you to do just enough work to graduate, and spend the rest of the time unwinding (ok, partying) from the stress of having had to pass the entrance exams. Take the entrance exams out of the equation and you still pretty much have the same deal -- kids coming out of high school with more freedom but even less sense of purpose.
From my college experience, it's apparent that students in liberal arts majors (not sciences or engineering -- class by themselves there) really have to try to fail, in order to fail. That doesn't mean self-sabotage so much as willful negligence of requirements. It's my humble opinion that failure to attend class with semi-regularity, to turn in homework at all (not necessarily on time), and to be in class on exam days really requires a conscious effort. More than likely its conscious reallocation of time and resources to such noble pursuits as binge drinking or playing Everquest.
I think it could be time to nudge the bar of standards up, and get a handle on which students actually care enough to do the work. If there wasn't this giant push for everyone to complete college, the smaller number of college-educated people could actually make decent salaries. We've kind of lost the incentive -- now instead of going to college to get good jobs, we go to college to not get bad jobs. Hell, I'm going to grad school to get a good job. I often feel that I'm wasting my youth on it, but being as free of the machine as possible is a pretty strong motivator.
My case for bringing apprenticeship back and giving it some respect is still fairly strong. However, overcoming the five-year itch culture is an entirely different matter which would fill volumes.
One case in particular comes to mind afew years back where we set them an on-line tutorial to go through and answer some questions at the end. The questions varied, so this particular group spent DAYS going through the exercise and screen dumping all possible answers to the question, so they could answer any question given as an assignment. If they had just done the task given, it would only have taken them a few hours! I see similar examples all the time of students spending more time trying to "beat" the system, rather than just "extracting the digit" and getting on with it.
"They looked deep into my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined"
We could take languages as an example: Is it possible to claim to know a foreign language just because you know of several good and reliable dictionaries and grammars on the Internet? Or look at physics and mathematics, there are lots of books which contains loads of formulas, but they are useless unless you understand what they really say. Details, like the sixth, seveneth decimal of pi can be looked up (I do that myself), but if you have to go to the Internet to estimate the circumference of a wheel knowing the radius, you will be highly inefficient. Besides, you need to know that you should actually look for pi.
If I can alleviate the high stress these students are dealing with (and pocketing a nice reward) then that's one less student jumping off a building because they failed their parents/peers overblown expectations of performance. You can not get through a 4 year program cheating at every turn - by the end you won't be able to defend your diploma with a decent intellect! Either that or you'll screw up the in class exams.
Also, to those interested, writing custom papers is a great career if you like researching and learning new things. There is so much demand I get to pick and choose what essays to write and even if I make a grammatical or factual error I still get paid.
...would be to give out more original essay questions? Rather than telling students to do the same paper every other student at every other university is doing, have a little more creativity. Ask about more modern, ideally relatively recently released books. In the case of "classics", ask obscure questions.
I did a degree in Computer Science, the only essays we had were on topics that were either relevant to that point in time, or were on lectures we had attended. Getting anything close online would have been next to impossible...
Thoughts anyone?
I have also seen sites that advertise (for greater expense) to write papers individually for you
I would bet that they don't really write individual papers. They possibly have a stash of papers ready to go, and just "individualise" them to some degree.
Remember...what they are offering to do is ethically questionable anyway.
At my old New Zealand High School, the teacher's lounge, on the the top floor of the admin block, was maybe 200 yards line-of-sight from the 7th form common room. We gutted and rigged up one of those el-cheapo wireless FM microphones (you know, the kind which let you broadcast to your own radio, etc) in the ceiling above the lounge, rigged with a booster and decent directional antenna, and recorded all the conversations from the room on an old reel-to-reel tape machine while we were in classes. The most important thing we discovered was that teachers are very boring people. Aside from the odd bit of school politic-related backstabbing, they generally talked about nothing that 17 and 18 year-old students wanted to hear.
At my school (some of) the text books often times have an advertisement for turnitin.com on the backs of the books (composition class text books). This lets you know day one that the teachers are aware of this service - and makes you aware such a thing exists too.
Problem is however I once was looking up something on the Windows 2000 architecture and noticed a site had the same word for word definition of "kernel" as my book. So I googled the exact phrase.
Seems there were 100+ sites using the same exact definition. Well, by looking at the pages I noticed they all had the same author. Basically the page was on 100+ free hosts (and a few paid hosts).
Well, I wondered who copied it first. Was the book the original or the website? After further investigation I found out our books are made in India. Likely it was the same person writing the book and decided to make a web page out of his work. Then I stumbled across someone who claimed to work for the company writing the books and he said the deadline for the books is 20 days!
You must write a book on Cisco routers in 20 days too! Well, Sybex should sue the book writers because they not only stole text but diagrams right from their CCNA texts. Our Novell Netware book said that ARP was responsible for name-to-ip address resolution too!
Extra mod points to the person who can guess which crappy school I'm stuck at...
Hint: The text books are written by NIIT.
Get your Unix fortune now!
If you do choose to give students freedom in choosing paper topics, which I prefer, at least know your students and their work. Although it can be more problematic in large survey/lecture classes, somebody should know them and their abilities - you, TA, GSI, somebody. Again, the relevance of the paper to at least some of the ideas discussed in class is an obvious tip-off, as is a comparison to the students' interests exhibited in previously submitted work. It's not hard to spot a purchased paper, at all, if the professor/teacher is doing their job of teaching properly. 'Book reports' and cliffs' notes at the university level? Pah.
All of which brings me to the point of my rant - this kind of stuff only happens at institutions that employ crap teachers. Not necessarily lousy universities, but ones that permit shoddy, sub-standard teachers who should be teaching elementary-school english to pose and parade as 'professors'. Even with a 4/4 brutal teaching load at a large public institution, this kind of thing is simply a non-issue for teachers that actually work at it, rather than treating academia as if it were some sort of sinecure. It's an ivory tower only if you let it be, and if purchased essays are proliferating throughout academia, it reflects far worse on the professors who are too thick and lazy to preclude such submissions (or identify them, without google or a paid service, on the strength of their knowledge of the student and his/her work), and the institutions employing them, than students, of whom there will always be a few willing to try and cheat their way around substandard interest, intellect, or discipline. /rant.
Amor omnia vincit. Occasionally.
One professor had an even more radical method: he would only allow students to write about books that had just appeared, and the students had to structure their essays around specific questions that the professor posed. Impossible to get around this, unless you hire someone to write it to spec.
cheers, potor
When I was at College we discovered a pretty simple system. Now the staff weren't the brightest --- in fact, most of the students in my year already had degrees, whereas some of the staff hadn't even finished High School. Great teachers, bad academics.
Anyway, we'd be given a book to read, prescribed by the syllabus. If the teacher was new on staff, chances were they hadn't read it. If they had been there longer and had read it, it would have been so long ago it didn't matter.
We came up with a guaranteed system to pass those book reviews.
The problem those of us with degrees had was that we simply couldn't do that. We were trained to go in boots and all, and none of those essays were hard. But funnily enough, the system worked better than hard work and thinking.
Great staff, though. In that situation, being around people with real life and trade experience was a worth a lot more than reading a book none of them clearly cared about.
Cogito, ergo sig.
I never really trusted the guy, so I asked a couple of friends in his year to keep an eye out for the assignment (it had to be presented in class). Sure enough, after the presentations they came straight to see me with the class copyt of his assignment.
It was identical.
When I say identical, I mean identical. I had used the ugliest, most garish template MS-Works (it all seems so silly in retrospect) could give me (the staff rewarded heavy use of dialogue boxes and 'general creativity.') The mastheads, the page borders and everything were the same.
And the text was definitely mine. My friends were tipped off to the problem because it even sounded like me speaking. They knew he couldn't have done it.
The funny part was, though, he'd used correction fluid to blank out our names (I did it as a joint project) and every occurence of 'us,' 'we,' and so on throughout the piece and replaced it with his handwritten name and appropriate pronouns. He popped it into a photocopier, and his essay was done.
I immediately went to the staff member responsible for these things and she just about had a heart attack, not least because of the ugly template. She started an enquiry, and it turned out every piece of work he'd done up that point had been 'written' the same way. He quietly resigned from the college a week later. Not so much as an apology for those of us he'd ripped off. He still maintains that he did the work.
Great teachers, lousy academics. Not such great police, either.
Cogito, ergo sig.
I took a bunch of free hosting accounts, plus my personal site. And posted my papers online. Sometimes each word in the paper linked to another copy of the paper (which did the same thing).
So when the paper's due date had enough time to let me pull this little prank... it was normally never returned to me.
A few times the teacher exempt me from what was a terrible paper, simply because they never got it back from the librarian running the plagarism check.
Sometimes my name would be on top of the line copies, sometimes on the bottom, sometimes even in the HTML (when I wanted to really tick them off).
Other times I would break up my paper, and post a sentence on each page.
No rule against doing stuff like this. And it's a boatload of fun knowing your wasting someone's time!
For my Junior Term Paper, my English teacher informed us that he would be using turnitin.com to check our papers. I have a fundamental disagreement with the way turnitin profits, which is by using the works of students to reference other papers. So I wrote a lengthy essay on my opinion in this matter, that I considered my works copyrighted and would not tolerate it being submitted to turnitin(whenever you check a paper there, that paper is automatically included in their database forever). He was sympathetic towards my beliefs. I think everyone threatened with turnitin(except of course idiots who are plagiarizing) should take this approach, and stop turnitin from profiting illegally from our papers.
Another problem is re-use of reports. If you give a paper on Sports Marketing to your gym teacher(I write reports for gym because I don't take it) and to your Economics teacher, and they both check it, it will come up as completely plagiarized.
This sig is o Unfunny o Funny
There is another aspect to that, of course. One of my professors, Scott Nicholson, discussed the problem on CNN. I thought there was something about it on the website, but I couldn't find it in a quick look this morning. Anyway, he did a small piece discussing how little of a phrase one actually needed to find matches on the web. Four or five words is often enough.
He took a poll in one of my classes about turnitin.com and other sites. The students were overwhelmingly against it. Not because we're cheaters, but because we agree with the McGill student who fought the system. Many of us, oddly enough, consider turning in papers to a service who will keep it on file a copyright violation.
Dr. Nicholson's solution, and that of many others in our school is to use stepped assignments. If there is a large paper due at some point in the semester, we have to submit paper proposals by a given date. For some, we need to have outlines or a short presentation for the class at a later date. Most professors will allow students to submit papers for critique in advance of the due date. All of this is to not only make it more difficult for someone to buy or obtain a paper from somewhere, but also to help the students plan and work on the assignment over the semester rather than putting it off until the last minute.
And then, if necessary, there's always the Google trick.
So the teachers commit copyright infringement by submitting their students' works to turnitin and turnitin commits grand scale copyright infringement by copying, preserving and capitalising on "millions of student papers" without the students' permission. Great business!
By submitting their papers to Turnitin, the students agree to allow Turnitin to use their papers in such a manner.
Furthermore, you can't view any papers submitted to Turnitin unless you are the author, you are the author's teacher, or you have obtained written permission from the author. I know this because I submitted a rough draft and a final draft to Turnitin, and it flagged my final as being 67% identical to another submitted paper (the rough draft), but wouldn't let me view the other paper until I could prove that I had permission. I thought that was kind of strange, considering that I was using the same account for both papers, but it's nice to know that not just anybody can read what you submit.
You're willing to build up an "immense collection" of other people's papers, skim them, synthesize the pieces and bolt them together like an origami Frankenstein, but not willing to READ THE DAMN BOOK(S) AND THINK FOR A WHILE? Seriously. It's easy. If you're really lost, look up some published scholarly papers on the subject and use them to give you ideas. THEN CITE THEM.
As many people have discovered over the years, synthesis is much easier than actual work. You don't even need to be coherent, really, you just need to sound like you have a point.
I agree that it's easy to know the material and simply write the damn paper, but that requires thought, and to a lot of people, thought isn't easy. Don't ask me why, because I don't understand it either. But it's true nevertheless. People will go to great lengths to avoid actually thinking about something class related. Why? Because thinking isn't easy for them. They don't do it a lot, I guess. Many people, I've noticed, have the notion that they cannot think, and so don't even try. I'm not going to psychoanalyse them back to sanity.
In the humanities, as long as your argument (you do have an argument, right? as in a thesis statement?) holds water and is even remotely logical and grounded in the book, you're golden.
Hah! In the humanities, it's not about whether you have an argument or not. It's about whether it sounds like you have an argument or not.
One of my favorite classes was my English Lit class. I never even read the books for that one. The tests allowed you to use the book itself as a reference during the test (for quoting purposes) and basically consisted of writing a couple of essays on topics given by the prof. He'd provide like 6 topics, you choose 2, then write a quick paper using quotes from the book to support the position. If you know how to write an essay, this was absolute cake. Pick the easiest topics to support, then flip through the book picking sections at random. Quick scan for 3 or 4 quotations from various parts of the book that sound like they support your argument (doesn't matter if they do or not), which you copy down. Then you write the essay, inserting the quotes as needed. Remember, the prof is reading hundreds of papers here and is grading you quickly. As long as you sound good and have some obvious quotes in there, you get an A. If it's read by a student assistent, even better, as they probably don't know what the book is about anyway. Never read any of the material in that class, got the highest grade in the class. Prof. appearantly read one of my papers citing it as a great argument (so I heard, I skipped class that day), and I had simply pulled it out of nowhere with not one clue what the story was about.
I admit that I did get nervous on the final exam, which required a lot more essay writing, so I did some scanning of the books for like an hour before I went in, and wrote down several good quotes which could be read to support a wide range of positions. Remember, it's not what the book is actually saying, it's how it sounds and how you spin it. How it sounds is independant of the meaning behind it, and how you spin it is in your essay writing. This is the essence of the synthesis approach: to create something new from other things, especially without caring what the context of those other things may be.
Back in 1996, I had to do a paper for a weed-out course Political Science on gun control.
:)
:)
Being the good student, I attacked this paper with vigor, and spent about a week on it, gathering statistics, charts and whatnot. I scored an 'A' since it was overkill for a Freshman/Sophomore course.
Well, I was a C.S. major and the web was just starting to hit full stride, and I heard this commentator talking about a web site called 'School Sucks' (www.schoolsucks.com) which gathered research papers for people to download.
"What a novel idea!", I thought.
So I submitted my Gun Control paper to it, along with my email in case anyone had any problems with it. HEY! I spent a lot of time on this paper! I didn't want it to go to waste! tee hee.
For over 5 years later, about once every week, I got an email from someone who used it, thanking me, and some even adding to it, much like an open source project.
All told, I guess my little research paper led to over 200 A's, and made a lot of people happy.
Was good fun.
++Om
Although the iParadigms corporation (the parent company of turnitin.com) likes to scream to anyone who will listen that there's nothing wrong with turnitin.com, the truth is that by using it schools are almost guaranteed to violate both copyright laws and the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act (FERPA).
When a teacher submits a paper to turnitin.com the paper is archived indefinitely in their database for comparison to future paper submissions. In nearly all cases this is done without the student's knowledge or permission, which violates that student's copyrights. Remember, YOU own the rights to any school papers that you create, even if your only purpose in writing the paper is to fulfill a class assignment. There are certain instances in which a school will require a student to sign an intellectual property rights waver that gives up the copyrights on anything that they create to the school, but this happens almost exclusively with university graduate students - not the undergrads and highschoolers that turnitin.com is aimed at. Turnitin.com is using your copyrighted material for commercial purposes without your permission.
All copyright issues aside, use of turnitin.com also violates FERPA, which is a federal law prohibiting schools from sharing student's records, coursework, or pretty much anything else with anyone outside the school system (like, say, a for-profit corporation) without the student's explicit permission. The entire turnitin.com company is based around violating federal law.
I too, was sadly disappointed by college. But after being in the workforce for a few years, I've realized that the challenges in the profession often are far greater than the textbook problems presented in college. I realized a few years ago that going back for a masters was pointless from an intellectual perspective - there's very little in a master's program that I don't already know. Unless I needed a masters for a promotion or career move, there's little point in spending the money.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Well, of course the education industry isn't necessarily more or less moral than any other industry based on making money. I wasn't really addressing in my post the corruption (if you want to call it that...it seems a little strong though) in the system itself.
I've done some thinking about this because I the university I attended was a research institution that often rewarded professors for bringing in research funds and wouldn't punish them for being terrible professors. At first I expected nothing but the highest ethical standard of judgment of my professors by the administration...but the more I thought about it, the more I was glad that there was some focus on research money. I realized that it's the influx of money that made all of the good aspects of my college experience possible.
So should you pass a foreign student that can't speak English? In a perfect world, no, but what if such a policy would mean the school simply couldn't afford to hire you in the first place? What if adhering to such a high ethical standard in the marketplace would cause the school itself to have to fold? This might be a case of the greater good (it also might not be...I don't know the details of your particular situation at the time).
I had a Russian lit prof in college that had a standard retest policy for anyone that didn't like their midterm grade in the class. All you had to do was email her with a retest request and you'd be allowed to replace your midterm grade with an essay test. The essay test consisted of one unreasonably long essay and two insanely long essays. She'd email you the topic for the unreasonably long essay on Friday at 7pm and you had until 10pm to email back the result. Then Saturday at 10am you'd receive the next essay topic and you were responsible for sending that one back by 8pm and likewise on Sunday. The length requirements were absolute and would keep you writing pretty much the entire weekend.
Needless to say, the time you had to invest to correct a bad midterm grade was not worth it to most students. The time she had to invest in grading those essays, compared to what the student spent writing them, was not very high.
So, I think the point was that the administration might want you to do x, y, and z, but ultimately you're still in control of the student. If they complain about their grade you can give them that second chance, but just make the workload so insane that they're sorry they didn't just take the fail. Sure you ultimately have to still pass them, but they don't know that. :)
but have you considered the following argument: shut up.
That may be why he pushed a law through that took management of the UT endowment from a public, transparent process (that did a fine job) and turned it over to a secret, private company (surprisingly, a major contributor to W's political career!) that churned and burned like a low grade spamming boiler room operation.
BUT, with 150+ students it is difficult, at best. You don't seem to understand the amount of time it takes just to have that that many students writing papers at the same time, the amount of time it takes just to run a simple Google search on suspicious phrases in papers, the amount of time it takes to document the source(s) of plagiarized papers, nor the amount of time it takes to then conference with parents.
Parents, incidentally, who come in one of three basic varieties when their child is accused of cheating:
1-"Not my son/daughter, I don't care what you found."
2-"Well, son/daughter, you screwed up...just like always."
and the rare, but so prized
3-"I don't see what the big deal is, everyone does it to some degree...can't you reward his/her resourcefulness...or were you just trying to trap my kid? You know, I have a lawyer on speed dial..."
Needless to say, that if I dedicate as much time as I should to trying to catch just the most blatant instances of plagiarism, I would have little time to actually finish reading essays, let alone grade them, write lesson plans, attend special education meetings that take no small amount of time, attend school functions/meetings/professional development (unpaid continuing education required by district, state and increasingly, the NCLB act), prepare students for the multitude of standardized tests (not to mention benchmarks and other assessments) designed indeed to Leave No Child Untested a few days of the year, or spend one of the 10-12 hours each day in some way dedicated to teaching (most often 6 but increasingly 7 days a week during the school year), watch politicians say that I don't do enough with the resources I have while watching my pay, retirement, and benefits dwindle compared to other professionals, let alone spend time with my own family.
Yes, "kids are getting more sly about things," as you so succinctly put it. And keeping up with them is the point behind sites like turnitin.com. However, individual teachers, schools or districts must pay for the service.
Currently in Texas, the State Attorney General is arguing against a case brought by an alliance of school districts which challenges state education funding is inadequate due to a seemingly unending and unfunded bevy of state mandates to increase teacher and district accountability and thereby the current property tax model for funding education constitutes what is essentially a state income tax, which is unconstitutional in Texas. His argument yesterday was that districts don't make good use of the funds that they have, choosing instead to spend them on activities and curricula that are not mandated by the state, things like fine arts programs and sports.
In the current financial climate of education, it is sometimes difficult to have books for every student, pay teachers competitive salaries, or especially to find the $3,000-5,000 to subscribe to a service like turnitin.com. I certainly can't afford to pay for an individual subscription, nor can most public schools or districts.
I would love to "keep up" with all those "sly" students, but I would love it more if parents stopped downloading MP3's and saying it does no harm, it's just music, or sneaking drinks and snacks into theatres, or fibbing on their taxes, or any of a million ways and increasing multitude are teaching poor character to their children.
Getting caught cheating should be, after all, a lesson about morals.
Yet, I see every day students that see their parents and other adults willing to sacrifice every value in efforts to get their presumed "just desserts." Many of my students (high school sophomores and seniors) think that the only bad cheating happens when someone gets caught. The ideals of honor and integrity are becoming, if not rare, then so abstract (as a result of an increasingly diverse number of bad models read Enron, NY Times, "doping" athletes, etc.) as to be