Technological innovation reduces the costs and leads to more college cheating (Colleges Chase ...):
With their arsenal of electronic gadgets, students these days find it easier to cheat. And so, faced with an array of inventive techniques in recent years, college officials find themselves in a new game of cat and mouse, trying to outwit would-be cheats this exam season with a range of strategies — cutting off Internet access from laptops, demanding the surrender of cellphones before tests or simply requiring that exams be taken the old-fashioned way, with pens and paper.
I'm sure that some cheating happens in my class. But, I haven't yet seen the electronics pulled out. Maybe I can look forward to this next year.
The article discusses on the desire to get into graduate school as a major motivation for cheating:
Still, some students said they thought cheating these days was more a product of the mind-set, not the tools at hand.
"Some people put a premium on where they're going to go in the future, and all they're thinking about is graduate school and the next step," said Lindsay Nicholas, a third-year student at U.C.L.A. She added that pressure to succeed "sometimes clouds everything and makes people do things that they shouldn't do."
As everyone knows, cheating as an undergraduate is the best preparation for graduate school ... and life. My opinion is that college cheaters are digging their own graves. It seems like cheaters who get better grades than otherwise might receive higher entry wages but, when employers figure out that they are ill-prepared for actually working and getting it done themselves, their wage profile will be flatter than if they had studied in college.