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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.

The State Board of Higher Education is working to tighten admission policies for international students after an audit found some Chinese student transcripts submitted to Dickinson State University were fakes.

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.