Faking the grade

Remember the time you were sitting in algebra class and couldn't quite remember the formula for finding slope? While your teacher checked her e-mail, you ever so graciously tilted your head and glanced over at your neighbor's paper. M equals rise over run. Of course.\nWhether you did it during middle, high school or college, all of us are as guilty of cheating as "Scooter" Libby is for obstruction of justice. The only difference? A skilled cheater -- one who utilizes all the technology out there -- is not getting caught. \nIn a study of 50,000 college and 18,000 high school students in the United States, more than 70 percent admitted to having cheated. For most of these students, it's so easy to get away with it that they rationalize that it would simply be illogical not to cheat. \nStudies have shown that valedictorians are just as likely to cheat as laggards. In fact, academic fraud has become so common that it is now a social norm. Some cheat the old fashioned way with the infamous "cheat sheets" -- using a crumbled up piece of paper or even a body part as a means for translating difficult facts and formulas. But most cheaters take advantage of the profusion of technology and use the Internet to plagiarize, a cell phone to text message friends and find out the answers beforehand or a fancy graphing calculator to store equations. With a simple click, a student can take a photo of the test on his cell phone and send it to friends for all to see. \nNow you can not only "read" an entire novel simply by reviewing the summaries, themes and character lists on such online study guide Web sites as Sparknotes.com and Cliffnotes.com, but you can now get SparkNotes sent to your cell phone. SparkMobile, a new service from SparkNotes, will text students themes or iPod-friendly summaries of classic novels for free. Pop quiz in world lit? No problem: You have all the information you could possibly need stored on your minuscule cell phone.\nOne form of cheating seems to be especially popular among college students. Not conventionally thought of as a form of cheating, prescription drugs such as Adderall are deemed the new miracle pill by even the brainiest students. Pop a few of those orange bad boys and you're still buzzing at three in the morning. All of a sudden, the neighbor's blaring music is barely audible. While the academic steroid has several side effects for the nonprescribed user, what's a stroke every now and then going to hurt you? It's worth it, right?\nWhile new ways of cheating through technology or prescription drugs are only going to increase in coming years, our criminal ways are going to hurt us in the end. Who wants to live in a world with doctors who cheated their way through the MCAT or with journalists who fabricated news stories? It's like going to the candy store when you're on a diet and being tempted to chow down on that king-sized Hershey's chocolate bar. It might melt in your mouth momentarily, but in the end it will only come back to bite you in the butt.