Cheating 101

The cost of college may drive some students to bend the rules a bit when it becomes time to take that oh-so-important midterm or final

By Denise Martin
Staff Writer

Thirty-three thousand dollars per year. Say it again. Thirty-three thousand dollars per year. One more time. Thirty-three thousand dollars per year. Whether it's to secure future employment or perhaps to broaden your horizons, for whatever reason you've decided to come to college, let this be a reminder: You're shelling out thirty-three thousand dollars per year to be here. Most would call that quite the rate of investment in oneself.
Case in point, one has to wonder about the amount of cheating that goes on in a college campus. Despite the possible repercussions for students, cases of cheating and plagiarism in particular are not uncommon.
One of the easiest methods of cheating on an exam, according to several students, is to sketch notes in their blue book prior to a test. However, some professors have safeguarded themselves by exchanging blue books brought in by students on the day of the exam. In return for the new blue book, the student receives a blue book with a nifty departmental stamp.
"They're usually some flame mark or happy face type of thing," said a freshman cinema-television major. But don't those red smiley-faced stamps make you feel better about the exam?
In spite of such measures, students have still managed to find ways around the stamps. A reoccurring problem colleges encounter are those students who save prompts, exams or papers and then lend them to friends who take the class later on.
A sophomore majoring in business said, "Sure I've seen it. Especially for G.E.'s, sometimes professors have you turn in the blue book but don't care what you do with the exam itself. Most students stick it back into their booklet or trash it, but there are always the few industrious ones who think ahead and save them. Funny thing is, the professors rarely modify the questions from semester to semester."
Obviously, turning in someone else's work as your own is a form of plagiarism and cheating. But what about more blurred areas, such as the use of "study aids" like Cliffs Notes or Monarch's notes? These handy guides usually summarize a work by chapter and additionally provide some "commentary" or analysis on each. Students testify that they don't find this a form of cheating.
"Sometimes I just don't have time to do all the reading for all my classes. If I use Cliffs Notes, so what? They've been pretty good so far. I've gotten pretty decent grades on papers without reading some books. Plus, I still know what the book is about and what the important points are," said a freshman involved in the Writing 140 program.
A frighteningly easy and increasingly popular style of cheating is the copy-and-paste technique. For the computer illiterate - all seven of you out there - "copy-and-paste" refers to plagiarism online. Students interviewed explained exactly how simple the method of cheating is.
"Well, you go to any search engine, like Yahoo for example. Then you type in your subject or some keywords. Then some sites come up and you pick one that looks good. You click, check it out, and highlight the important stuff. Then you hit edit, copy and paste it into your document. Pretty easy, huh?" said one junior.
For the extremely desperate, there are also sites that offer free term papers and essays by subject. Cheathouse.com advertises that it hase 9,500 essays in its database from 44 categories. Making no apologies, they also provide 15 tips on how to cheat on exams. Cheathouse.com states that the company will help formulate ideas for "when that deadline is a few moments away and you still haven't started that assignment."
Another site, Chuckiii.com proclaims on the main page, "We are dedicated to helping students with their everyday college needs." Such "everyday needs," according to the site, include being able to download thousands of completed essays with the click of a button. The self-dubbed "college resource" features thousands of absolutely free, pre-written papers on everything from anatomy and physiology to movies and TV - no strings attached. The catch? There isn't one. They request their users to contribute papers in return; however, this is an option and is not obligatory.
While some companies provide their services free of charge (praying to God that you will notice and hopefully click those spiffy banner ads so that they can make a buck) others charge up to $20 per page.
Planetpapers.com advertises that their papers are free but charges $16.95 a page with a five-page minimum for custom-made essays. Another site that charges fees, Termsnpapers.com, states that the papers are written by "quality and experienced writers who dedicate their time to produce the best results for you." However, unlike other cheating sites, the company also specifies that the term papers can't be turned in for the purchaser's own credit and should only be used as a guide. Right.
For $33,000 per year, you'd think the urge to actually learn something would be a tad stronger. For $130,000 of college education, you'd think the rate of cheating would not be as substantial as it is. After all a degree will only get you in. It's what you know that determines whether you'll stay. And after you're $130,000 in debt, you're going to need to keep that job.

Copyright 2000 by the Daily Trojan. All rights reserved.
This article was published in Vol. 139, No. 54 (Monday, April 10, 2000), on page 9.