According to the Los Angeles Times, a California man had expert test-takers (ringers) sit for a graduate school admissions test in New York. These ringers would then telephone the answers to Los Angeles, where they were encoded onto pencils and sold to students just prior to their taking the same test on the West Coast. Students paid up to $9,000 for these unique "answer-encoded" pencils.

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‘Fess Up
Have you ever cheated on a test? Have you ever downloaded a term paper from the Internet, or copied your roommate's homework? If you have, you're in good company, so to speak. According to the latest surveys, a huge majority of college students — up to 98 percent — are majoring or minoring in cheating.

Many are well-prepared to do so: They cheated their way through high school, junior high and even grade school.

By the time these students begin preparing for college entrance exams, they have cheating techniques down pat. Consider:

When Who’s Who Among American High School Students conducted a survey of cream-of-the-crop high schoolers, 80 percent admitted to cheating at least once. Another study, this one conducted by the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University, had 75 percent of collegians admitting to at least one instance of cheating. Some students admit to cheating their way all the way to a Ph.D(eceit).

Our professional schools are just as bad. The prevalence of cheating among medical students especially dismays Emporia State University psychology Professor Stephen Davis, who has studied graduate school level deceit. As he wryly told U.S. News & World Report, "I hope I never get a brain disease."

Technology has led to some bizarre cheating methods. Students have been caught with tiny video cameras hidden on their bodies — cameras that allow someone outside the classroom to view the questions, quickly dig up the answers, and then notify the test-taker via a silent pager. Students have also been known to email answers to each other between classes; others use cell phones to dial multiple choice answers into test-takers' pagers.

There appears to be far more cheating going on than there used to be, and there's no shortage of explanations: Too much pressure for high grades. Technology that makes cheating laughably easy. Tough competition for places at elite colleges. An "everybody's doing it, nobody cares" academic culture. Even — perhaps worst of all — parents who encourage their kids to cheat.

There's a lot of self-justification going on, as well.

"I realize that it's wrong, but I don't feel bad about it, either, partly because I know everyone else is doing it," a University of Alabama student told a reporter.

"We all know cheating is cheating," a Duke University student named Melissa adds, "But there are times that you cheat because there aren't enough hours in the day."

Well, this is just great. If this keeps up, we're going to have accountants who can't add, doctors who don't know an appendix from a gallbladder, and veterinarians who can't tell a Chihuahua from a large rat.

Going to Extremes
Academics seem to have grasped the fact that this is not a good situation, and they're searching for solutions. Some want to toughen the school honor code. Others want to soften the demands placed on college-bound kids, to take off the tremendous pressure to get an A on every quiz. And some are suggesting we ought to find ways to lighten the academic load — a load students are apparently having great difficulty managing.

Others are doing their best to outfox the cheaters. It's literally a full time job. Ray Nicosia is the director of test security for the Educational Testing Service, which administers the SAT. On test-taking day, Nicosia "verifies that test booklets are kept in a secure storage area, far from the probing eyes — and fingers — of students, until the very last minute," says U.S. News & World Report. Nicosia scrutinizes students' ID cards, and makes sure they're randomly assigned to seats spaced at least four feet apart.

Students who take important tests can expect to see the walls bristling with video cameras. Coming soon: Biometric scans to ensure that you don't send a friend to take a test for you.

These measures are sadly necessary, but catching cheaters ought to be considered a solution of last resort. Far better is to attack the problem at its source. Linda Trevino, professor of management at Pennsylvania State University; Kenneth Butterfield, assistant professor management at Washington State University and Don McCabe, professor of organization management at Rutgers University, have spent 10 years surveying some 12,000 college students. According to the Chronicle of Higher Education, their research suggests "that a major factor determining whether a student will cheat or not is the academic culture of the specific institution that he or she attends."

In other words, if professors and students are blase about cheating, plenty of cheating is going to happen.

Trevino, Butterfield and McCabe blame a number of factors for the loss of campus integrity. They note the lack of traditional values in a more permissive society, and larger campuses, with their resulting loss of a sense of shared culture and accountability.

When campuses enforce a strong ethical code, far less cheating occurs. But, as the Chronicle notes, "the success of honor codes appears to be rooted in a campus tradition of mutual trust and respect among students and between faculty members and students." Unfortunately, the Chronicle adds, "such cultures usually take significant time and effort to develop and maintain."

That's partly because today's collegians have been, according to Clark University philosophy Professor Christina Hoff Sommers, "thrown back into a moral Stone Age," trying to make moral decisions without the benefit of "thousands of years of moral experience and moral progress." Why? Because "the notion of objective moral truths is in disrepute" and students today are suffering from "cognitive moral confusion." Or, as C. S. Lewis explains in The Abolition of Man, "We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honour and are shocked to find traitors in our midst."

Where You Come In
What can we do about it? First, we ought to quit blaming technology. Students who view cheating as a violation of their personal moral code are not going to cheat — no matter how easy technology makes it for them.

Second, we can act on some of the recommendations of those who have studied this issue. We can try talking to cheaters, and we can turn them in. We can help professors develop ways to minimize cheating.

Or, we can take the bold approach, as Travino, Butterfield and McCabe suggest. We can work with classmates and professors to create a culture of integrity — to make our campus a place where cheating is viewed as the despicable and shameful thing it is. We can change the campus honor code to reflect that of, say, the University of Virginia, where the honor code demands expulsion of anyone caught cheating even once.

But ethics education ought to take place within the classroom, as well. Sommers writes that the "average student today does not come to college steeped in a religious or ethical tradition in which he or she has uncritical confidence." Worse, many students "come to college dogmatically committed to a moral relativism that offers them no grounds to think that cheating is just wrong." She recommends that all students be required to take a course on "the philosophy of virtue," studying Plato, Augustine, Kant and Aristotle.

As outrageous as it may sound today, we could go a step further by instilling heavy doses of virtue into students the way students 100 years ago received it. "In the 19th century, the ethics course was a high point of college life," Sommers writes, and was usually taught by the college president, who would "uninhibitedly urge the students to become morally better and stronger."

Today, you'd hear that kind of talk only on a devoutly Christian college campus.

Of course, your campus may not be terribly interested in doing much about cheating. Even if it is, major cultural shifts like this take time to sink in. In the meantime, how do you cope with those around you who continue to lie and cheat — especially if you're competing against them for grades and scholarships? What do you do if you're in a class full of cheaters — and the professor grades on the curve?

The one thing you should never, never, never do is to allow yourself to be sucked into cheating yourself. Cheating is a form of lying, a violation of God's law — one so serious that we're told the kingdom of Heaven will be closed to those who "love and practice falsehood" (Rev. 22:15 RSV).

We must cling to integrity, even if it means loosing that precious scholarship. Even if it means not getting into our first-choice school. Even if it means flunking a class, or even flunking out of school while cheaters prosper and graduate with "honors."

Yes, it's hard to see a cheating classmate step forward to accept the scholarship, award, or graduate school admission letter you worked hard for yourself. I have an idea of how it feels: My children are 11 and 13 years old, and already they complain of classmates who cheat — and teachers who are indifferent to it. I wonder, and worry, what's going to happen when they take their college entrance exams one day against a nation of cheaters.

Really, I shouldn't be so fretful (righteously angered, yes. Anxiety-ridden, no). When we see others getting away with cheating, we need to put our anger aside and recall to mind that God cares even more about our future — and our children's future — than we do. He's perfectly aware that unscrupulous people might attempt to interfere with our — and His — plans.

If you're tempted to cheat in a desperate attempt to keep pace with your classmates, remember the outcome of one of the worst "cheating scandals" in history. You can read about it in the book of Genesis. Joseph, beloved son of Jacob, was preparing to live a comfortable and happy life helping run the family business. But his jealous brothers cheated him out of that future. They sold Joseph to slaver traders, who took him to Egypt. Over the next few years, he was a slave in a rich man's home, and spent two years in a prison, doing time for a crime he didn’t commit. And yet, God used those wretched circumstances to save an entire nation — and Joseph became the second most powerful man in Egypt. The future God planned for Joseph was far more glorious than he could ever have imagined, never mind planned, for himself.

My point is, as you prepare for your own future, you need to trust God — trust Him enough not to attempt to justify breaking His moral laws in order to keep up with unethical classmates. Even if the worst happens — for example, if you don't get into graduate school because a cheating classmate's grades were higher than yours — you can be confident that God has His hand on your life, even if you can't always see it.

God knows you're competing with cheaters. But the scriptures say that if you are willing to honor Him, he will honor you.

And that's ultimately worth more than all the high-tech, "answer encoded" James Bond-style pens in the world.