The Nation: CHEATING IN COLLEGES

"Cheating is not endemic," says Johns Hopkins Dean Sigmund Suskind. "It's epidemic. My colleagues all over agree." Yale Dean Eva Balogh describes it as "rampant." At Lehigh University, a telephone poll shows that fully 47% of the students have cheated on exams, and at the University of Southern California, the student newspaper reports that as many as 40% have resorted to plagiarism.

Plainly, the military academies have lots of company when it comes to cheating. Educators agree that intense pressure for better grades is at least partly to blame. An ill-prepared student may panic and copy from a classmate during a test simply to pass. More often, it seems, the cheater is not the marginal student but the one with aspirations for graduate school or law school.

Is cheating more prevalent than ever at the nation's 3,055 colleges and universities? There is no annual tabulation to prove it, just a feeling among many administrators. Some cite America's moral climate as a fundamental reason for the phenomenon. Laments Suskind: "Watergate and its general milieu, American preoccupation with material goods, decreasing family values—they are all part of the problem. There is a morality problem in the external world and it's hard to wall off the university."

Stanford's President Richard Lyman offers a different explanation. "There is a much more diverse range of people in college nowadays," says he, "so it is more difficult to get conformity to any one standard."

Cheating practices are as varied as the causes. Yalies talk of the student—possibly mythical—who walked into the school print shop as exams were being run off, sat down on an inked galley and walked off with a set of test questions on the seat of his pants. Another student, totally unprepared for his exam in Chinese history, labeled

his blue book "Number Two," wrote a single grandiloquent concluding paragraph and handed it in. The professor later apologized for losing blue book "Number One" and gave the student a B. Less ingenious but far more prevalent are those who sneak "crib sheets" into exam rooms, furtively copy from classmates' papers or even, thanks to technological advances, use pocket-size tape recorders with earphones to play back lecture notes or important formulas. Then there are the pre-med students who sabotage classmates' lab experiments and law students who check out scarce reading material from school libraries for the duration of a course.

The most prevalent type of academic dishonesty, however, is plagiarism. As U.C.L.A. Dean of Students Byron H. Atkinson notes, plagiarism "has always been something in the scholarly ethic that transcends rape and murder." Harvard students talk of the undergraduate who made five copies of a friend's paper on "The Nature of War," used it unchanged in five courses ranging from Sociology to Morals, and got grades of A-toC-.