Monday, May 22, 2006 | 7:17 a.m.
A college student surreptitiously slides a camera-equipped cell phone out of his pocket, photographs his test, and sends the image to a friend outside the classroom. His accomplice replies with the question's answer.
This James-Bond-cheats-on-his-midterm scene took place at UNLV, and the results weren't quite what he intended: he got caught and his escapade is prompting a university crackdown on cell phones.
The university is warning professors of the lurking menace of camera phones, text messaging, Blackberries and iPods because they can lead to gadget-enabled cheating.
But stopping cheats from using these high-tech toys isn't any harder than stopping the student with a cheat sheet stuffed into a shoe.
Phil Burns, who investigates academic misconduct at UNLV, said digital delinquents can usually be stopped by a method left over from the era when the slide rule ruled the lecture hall: having instructors and teaching assistants prowl the aisles.
Not only will that tactic catch furtive text messengers, it will also deter what's still the most popular method of cheating: looking at the other guy's test. For good measure, Burns said, professors should ban extraneous devices such as cell phones. (And there is perhaps no device professors hate more than cell phones, unaccustomed as instructors are to being interrupted.)
"These things really aren't rocket science," Burns said. "When we have a new challenge, there are really logical and often easy responses."
If the nature of cheating on tests hasn't changed much, Burns said, the nature of cheaters has. A cheater used to be the desperate loser, academically inept and on the verge of flunking. Now, Burns said, cheaters are desperate winners.
"A lot of the more intentional - and thus more egregious - cases are the students who need to be perfect," Burns said. "It's the A-student who must be an A to get into grad school or get that six-figure salary."
That sort of the-ends-justify-the-means mentality, Burns said, makes him worry about those who would claw their way to the top in life.
"That sort of mentality is why we ended up with stuff like Enron," Burns said. "If you learn in one area of life that it's OK to cheat in class or on a test, it affects your sense of personal honesty and integrity."
UNLV had over 100 instances of "academic misconduct" this year, Burns said. The term that covers offenses as blatant as cell phone shenanigans and as comparatively trivial as misattribution or a small amount of plagiarism. The most prevalent kind of misconduct is plagiarism. Burns said he expects that number to rise as reports of cheating trickle in from last week's final exams.
Ann Johnson, who handles the most serious cases of cheating at the Community College of Southern Nevada, said she's only dealt with two cases this year: one of a student caught peeking at another's test and the other of a student in an online class hacking into a classmate's homework. She said, however, that there may have been cases that professors and deans chose to deal with themselves.
While plagiarism may be an affliction of modern education, Burns said the problem of in-class cheating is age old and not any worse than it used to be.
"Abel may have cheated off Cain," Burns said. "Who knows?"
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