The professor caught his student cheating, plagiarizing part or all of her

political science term paper. The following is a snippet of their

conversation, overheard as they spoke in the professor’s Tahoe Hall office

with the door open:

Student: I didn’t copy anything. Those are my words.

Professor: Well, I found these two paragraphs on this Web site here…and

your paraphrase matches word-for-word here…

Student (frightened): OK…OK. But that’s all. The rest are my words. And

that’s, like, 99 percent of the paper.

Professor: But it’s plagiarism. The university has a policy about

plagiarism. I have a class policy about it…

Student (wailing): Please don’t flunk me! I need this class to graduate this

semester!

Professor: I’m not sure what you want me to do. It’s out of my hands…

That frightened student was right to worry about failing the course, but her biggest concern should have been the academic equivalent of the death penalty – expulsion from the university. According to Sacramento State rules, use someone else’s words or ideas and call them your own, the school can make you disappear.

But does academia’s severe hand deter cheating? Is our wailing senior an anomaly, or merely a sign of our times?

The 17th century French philosopher Blaise Pascal said, “Mutual cheating is the

foundation of society.” As long as there have been rules, there have been

cheats. By many accounts, however, fraud is enjoying a sort of golden age,

where corner-cutting is acceptable and street corner scams become Wall

Street audit rules.

Just look at last year.

_ Historians Doris Kearns Goodwin and Stephen Ambrose – whose works are texts for history, journalism and political science classes at Sac State – both pulled books off the shelves after charges of plagiarism surfaced.

_ College football coach George O’Leary set the land-speed record for shortest tenure at Notre Dame, losing his 5-day-old job after the press unearthed lies on his resume.

_ Our own Hornet football team became a punch line on Jay Leno’s Tonight Show after four players were photographed applying cooking spray to their uniforms during a game against the University of Montana.

Seventy-five percent of high school students questioned for a Rutgers’ Management Education Center survey admitted to “serious cheating” in school, twice the number who admitted cheating in 1969. More than half said they took words from articles on the Internet. Perhaps the most troubling statistic was that 50 percent did not think copying test answers qualified as cheating.

So what’s going on? One reason people cheat, according the to the Rutgers’ study, is the pressure to succeed. Another is our intense aversion to failure.

A student who was interviewed for the survey put it this way: “What’s important is getting ahead. The better grades you have, the better school you get into, the better you’re going to do in life. And if you learn to cut corners to do that, you’re going to be saving yourself time and energy. In the real world, that’s what’s going to be going on. The better you do, that’s what shows. It’s not how moral you were in getting there.”

It sounds like our pleading senior isn’t all that unusual.

But the pressure to succeed doesn’t completely explain our fondness for scams. Sometimes we love a good cheater, someone who can beat the system, especially

if we think it’s unfair.

The IRS estimates that Americans shortchanged Uncle Sam $195 billion last year, a whopping $1,600 per taxpayer. Cable TV piracy costs the industry $6.6 billion in fees, $12 billion if you add in lost premium channel and pay-per-view revenue.

Ask someone who is fudging their tax return or pirating cable or satellite TV why they do it, and you’ll likely get some variation on the answer, “Because paying (taxes, cable or satellite rates) are a rip-off.”

And didn’t we shed a tear when Napster was forced offline after losing a bruising legal battle with the Recording Industry Artists Association? We learned our lesson, though. We dried our eyes, and with renewed zeal, found another online music piracy Web site to keep our CD burner spinning. After all, those recording artists and music companies make millions, and CDs are overpriced anyway, right?

Of course, those perverse rationalizations suggest that somehow we can steal, cheat and scam our way into restoring fairness. We’re noble thieves, latter-day Robin Hoods. We take from the rich and give…to ourselves.

Our culture has undergone a dramatic shift in moral standards, where, on one level, cheating and deceit have become the tools of success. Yet, a tension remains. We may have an urge to cheat, but we still detest cheaters. We’re still outraged when a business pollutes the water to avoid waste disposal expenses. It’s still an affront to our sensibilities when we hear of someone bilking government social programs to avoid finding honest work. We still get mad if we catch a classmate peeking at our answers on a midterm test.

Studies show that people will go to great lengths to “out” people who cheat, even when the cost and effort required cancel out any gain from catching the cheater.

Social scientists think this penchant for finding and punishing the unlawful dates back to our past as hunter-gatherers, when working in concert to share food was key to the survival of the group. Freeloaders were outcasts.

Which is exactly how that plagiarizing student must have felt, like an outcast, faced with the prospect of explaining to her family and friends why she wouldn’t be walking in the graduation ceremony.

Thankfully, there are some things that no amount of cheating can cover up.