The seminar was enlightening for faculty—who knew that students were pasting cheat notes on the backside of water bottle labels?—and it was a learning experience for the four public relations students who led the seminar.

Those students comprise one of three teams from the School of Journalism and Mass Communications who will compete in this year’s Bateman Team competition among public relations students across the country. The theme of this year’s Bateman competition is academic integrity.

“The Center for Academic Integrity reports that 80 percent of students admit to cheating at least once,” said Rebecca Dulin, a senior public relations major from Easley. “And Education Week reports that 47 percent of students admit to cheating using the Internet.”
Of the 750 students surveyed by Dulin’s team, 67 percent admitted to cheating in some way.

So how are students cheating these days? Some of the cheating gimmicks are variations on age-old cheat note scams: pasting cheat notes under pantyhose or on the bottom of a baseball cap’s bill. Others use technology such as PDAs or cell phones with text messaging capabilities as a sort of “call a friend” lifeline during an exam.

Then there are the online vendors—realpapers.com and megaessays.com—who sell term papers and essays on any subject and even create customized topic papers for $19.95 per page.

Katie Miles, a public relations senior from Louisville, Ky., encouraged faculty members to stress academic honesty at the beginning of their courses, to prohibit electronic devices in classrooms during exams, and to support a campus-wide subscription to TurnItIn.com or similar software that is capable of detecting plagiarized text in essays and term papers.

At least two universities, Kansas State and the University of Texas, have initiated new grading scales (e.g., an X placed beside a grade) that note academic dishonesty on a student’s final course grade.

The other two Bateman Teams at USC are tackling the academic integrity topic from different perspectives. One is promoting the implementation of an honor code; the other is promoting the Carolina Creed and student athletes as positive role models.

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