Your Cheatin' Heart

You stayed up late last night watching movies with your fraternity brothers instead of tooling for your physics mid-term. Now it's test time and you're bound to fail unless you manage to crib a few answers off your classmate's answer sheet. What do you do?

Forty to 60 percent of college students today would cheat, reports Kansas psychologist Stephen F. Davis, Ph.D. The number has skyrocketed since 1941, when the first study of academic dishonesty counted 23 percent of undergraduates as cheaters.

Part of the reason for the jump may be the perception by students that college is "a glorified vocational tech school," says the Emporia State University professor. "Students are not hem for knowledge, just for a meal ticket-their diploma. And if cheating helps them got it, why not?"

But the attitude seems to carry over to real life. Those who admit to cheating in high school and college may also wind up taking illegal shortcuts through life-cheating on income taxes or expense accounts, using a fuzzbuster, or plumping up credentials on a resume.

In a survey of 2,153 juniors and seniors from colleges across the nation, over 70 percent of men and women confessed to cheating during high school, Davis reported to the American Psycological Association.

In college, nearly halt the students used their newly learned cribbing skills to cheat on four separate occasions during their undergraduate careers. More men reported transgressions than women.

Why the discrepancy? More men than women believe that cheating improves exam scores, though 90 percent of both male and female undergraduates believe that an instructor who announced penalties at the beginning of the academic term would deter cheating.

Penalties or not, poor pressure, unrealistic parental expectations, and the burden of maintaining a high grade point average for graduate school often make cheating a too-tempting option, especially for those who may be naturally drawn to it. Explains Davis: "Heavy duty cheaters are people motivated by externals--that grade on the paper, not the knowledge they got writing it."

There's very little professors can do to stop the cheating rage, besides distributing different test versions and monitoring aisles-unless says Davis, "they're ready to get a good lawyer."

PHOTO: Cheating as a life-long achievement. (ARCHIVE PHOTOS)