Students cheating on an exam isn’t exactly shocking news. We’ve probably all done it to one time or another through our school years. But what is news is that according to a recent Newsweek magazine article, cheating has reached almost epidemic proportions, aided by lightning fast advances in personal technology:

The rates of academic cheating have skyrocketed during the past decade. In a huge study of 50,000 college and 18,000 high-school students in the U.S. by Duke University’s Center for Academic Integrity, more than 70 percent admitted to having cheated. That’s up from about 56 percent in 1993 and just 26 percent in 1963. Internet plagiarism has quadrupled in the past six years, according to the same study. . . .

[T]echnological advances have made cheating easier than ever. From purchasing “original” essays from Web sites like Gradesaver.com to “outsourcing” computer-programming homework to experts in India via sites like Rentacoder.com, students can now buy A’s for the price of a school lunch.

At the same time, mobile phones and MP3 players have given test takers new tools: picture messaging lets them contact friends outside the classroom with photographed copies of whole exams. . . . Competition, though, is the real culprit. As the work force becomes ever more crowded and the number of college grads skyrockets, top educational credentials are increasingly seen as the only sure vehicle to success.

While it is easy for educators like myself to blame the students directly who are cheating for their apparent lack of morals, honesty, and willingness to just study hard as they should, as a sociologist I can also recognize that the social pressures to “succeed” these days are increasing. As the bar gets raised each year and the standards for measuring up get higher and higher, students inevitably cave into the pressures.

Nonetheless, cheating is cheating. Dishonesty is dishonesty. Yes pressures are increasing but in the same way that the overwhelming majority of people living in poverty do not commit crimes in order to “succeed,” so too should we expect the same from students, most of whom are in a much more privileged position than people living in poverty.

The bottom line is, do we really want to legitimize cheating and dishonesty as an accepted way of life in our society? I sure hope that for the vast majority of Americans (and all around the world for that matter), the answer will be no.