Here’s a thought as we go into finals week: Surveys at places like Rutgers, the home of Professor Don McCade, who seems to be the most widely quoted expert on academic dishonesty, and The Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University suggest that 75 percent of students indulge in some sort of cheating.

A student at a Rutgers focus group was quoted as saying, “I guess the first time you do it, you feel really bad, but then you get used to it.” Another in that same group said, “People cheat. It doesn’t make you less of a person or worse of a person. There are times when you just are in need of a little help.”

There are plenty of places to get that little help. We students can go to Internet sites like schoolsucks.com which delivers papers at $4.95 a page or cheater.com and a myriad of other sites that offer similar services for dishonesty despite their laughable disclaimers. Not as easy as it once was. There are now faculty guides for finding Internet cheats. It still goes on and the researchers tell us sometimes at twice the rate three decades ago.

I find that appalling and angering. Students who can’t cut it, but make it by chicanery not only frustrate fellow students who do their own work, they cheapen our grades, our degrees and finally the university.

I agree with Professor Glenn C. Altschuler of Cornell who wrote recently, “Cheating, after all, is simply one manifestation of moral laxity that will not go away without a transformation in values.”

So how do we get from here to there? How do we make that transformation in values?

Literature from the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University suggests enforcement of rules and publicity – perhaps without names – but getting the message out that another fool who thought he could get away with cheating has been caught. The literature also suggests that rigid codes of honor that are more vigorously discussed and taken more seriously as a shared ethic can have a very significant impact. I would suggest another. Among this faculty, I am sure there are great women and men of impeccable integrity whom you can study and emulate.

What you are at this university today is pretty well formed. If you are a person of honor, you’ll probably stay that way. If you are a cheat, you’ll probably continue on an addictive path of unfair advantage ending up like some of the people in today’s headlines. If you are somewhere in the middle, now is the time to, in the best sense, exploit the tremendous opportunity for good that is Ohio State.

There are already enough cheaters out there. Enron and Worldcom executives cheated and wiped out the life savings of ordinary trusting people like you and me.

And business is not alone. My brothers and sisters in journalism have brought their fair share of shame to our profession. Jayson Blair gave The New York Times what its publisher called “a huge black eye” when he wrote what purported to be stories from out of town from his New York home and even turned in expense accounts to pay for them.

You can even be entertained this week by the journalistic sins of disgraced New Republic Associate Editor Stephen Glass, who also fabricated stories, in the movie “Shattered Glass.”

But, hey, it’s not all bad.  At Staples High School in Westport, Conn., indignant students have joined their principal John J. Brady and the PTA to work toward stamping out the cheating their classmates seem compelled to do because of the competition to get into Ivy League schools. It all got started when a student was caught with a cheat sheet printed on the inside of the label on his bottled water. The water even acted as a magnifier so he could cram more fine print on the label. How sad. He had the creative power to develop such a scheme, think of what he could do if he applied his knowledge honestly.

Richard Stelling is a continuing education student and former Lantern editor. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].