This is interesting...
Statistics
Here are some recent findings:
Almost 80% of college students admit to cheating at least once-- The Center for Academic Integrity studies.
36% of undergraduates have admitted to plagiarizing written material-- Psychological Record survey.
90% of students believe that cheaters are either never caught or have never been appropriately disciplined-- US News and World Report poll.
58.3% of high school students let someone else copy their work in 1969, and 97.5% did so in 1989-- The State of Americans: This Generation and the Next.
257 chief student affairs officers across the country believe that colleges and universities have not addressed the cheating problem adequately-- from a study by Ronald M. Aaron and Robert T. Georgia: Administrator Perceptions of Student Academic Dishonesty in Collegiate Institutions.
According to the Gallup Organization, the top two problems facing the country today are: 1) Education and 2) Decline in Ethics (both were ranked over crime, poverty, drugs, taxes, guns, environment, and racism, to name a few)-- Gallup Organization, October 6-9, 2000.
30% of a large sampling of Berkeley students were recently caught plagiarizing directly from the internet-- results of a Turnitin.com test, conducted from April-May 2000.
And although many instructors are aware of the problem, most feel powerless to stop it.
55% of faculty "would not be willing to devote any real effort to documenting suspected incidents of student cheating"-- from a study by Donald L. McCabe: Faculty Responses to Academic Dishonesty: The Influence of Honor Codes.
"With respect to cheating, I'm just in denial. I just don't want to deal with it because I know it is a huge problem."-- San Luis Obispo professor, as reported in Net Learning.
"Who wants to sit around looking for websites trying to find out if a paper is plagiarized or not... pretty soon you're a private investigator."-- a Stanford University professor, from an article in TechWeb News.
"[Plagiarism] is one of those areas in the academy that no one wants to talk about and is often rewarded for not addressing actively."-- an Associate VP of Student Life, as posted in The Chronicle of Higher Education's "Colloquy."
"Too few universities are willing to back up their professors when they catch students cheating, according to academic observers. The schools are simply not willing to expend the effort required to get to the bottom of cheating cases"-- as stated by The National Center for Policy Analysis.