BERKELEY, Calif.
News that dozens of community college students in the San Francisco Bay Area may have been hitting their checkbooks rather than textbooks in a cash-for-grades scam highlighted an academic dilemma: What to do about cheaters?
College admissions officials say most students are honest. Still, the problem of shamming scholars, from juiced-up resumes to purloined prose, has prompted some administrators to start double-checking the veracity of student applications.
The idea of students shirking their way through college doesn’t surprise John Barrie, who runs an anti-plagiarism Web site called Turnitin.com.
“It’s become easier; it’s become a lot more prevalent,” he says. “It’s the ‘end justifies the means’ world these days.”
One of the latest cheating cases came at Diablo Valley and Los Medanos colleges in the Bay Area, where officials believe dozens of students paid as much as $600 to have their grades changed on the Contra Costa County Community College District’s computer.
