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An associate dean of academic services spends a lot of time studying, lamenting and worrying about cheating in universities, but a Montreal-based online service that propels the activity to a new level made even her wince. The website unemployedprofessors.com has teachers writing papers for students. "So you can play while we make your papers go away" is its tag line.

Easy A's may be even easier to score these days, with the growing popularity of online courses. Technologically advanced students are finding ways to cheat that let them ace online courses with minimal effort, in ways that are difficult to detect.

In the technical world of bio-informatics, two University of Kansas computer scientists were riding high in 2009 having published three articles with an international audience. Portions of all three of their articles had been lifted from other scientists' work. The entire summarizing statement in their presentation had come from someone else's journal article.

The detection of wholesale cheating in college applications is on the rise due to the use of Turnitin for Admissions, an anti-plagiarism database service that compares student essays to an immense archive of other writings. Around the country, more than 100 colleges and universities have adopted it, mainly in graduate divisions, although Stanford University is among the dozen schools starting to use it for freshman applicants this year.

iParadigms, creators of Turnitin and the leader in originality checking and plagiarism prevention, today announced the results of a new plagiarism study which shows that social and user-generated web sites are the most popular resources for student copying, followed by academic and homework-related sites

The frontier in the battle to defeat student cheating may be here at the testing center of the University of Central Florida. As the eternal temptation of students to cheat has gone high-tech – not just on exams, but also by cutting and pasting from the Internet and sharing of homework online like music files – educators have responded with their own efforts to crack down.

Different rules in different countries often make it harder for international students to understand what is and what isn't allowed. While a student may understand plagiarism, it can be difficult for them to grasp the concept of cheating.

The University of Cauca uncovered what could be trickery in entrance exams to this year's first semester. It stated that the scores of 32 students in both assertive and non-assertive questions closely coincided. Among the doubtful candidates, 18 got into medicine, 4 into nursing, 2 into physiotherapy, and 2 into civil engineering.