[1] It's a tenth-grader's dream: Your teacher catches you cheating, and your parents take your side. That's exactly what happened last December to a group of sophomores at Piper High School in Piper, Kan. Teacher Christine Pelton had assigned her students a semester-long biology project. When the kids turned in their papers, Pelton found that almost a quarter of them (28 out of 118) had been plagiarized. And not only plagiarized, but plagiarized poorly. According to Pelton, entire sections of the papers were identical, copied from the same Internet websites.

[2] She had already warned her students about cheating and its consequences. Each of the 28 offenders received a zero on the assignment, and a failing grade in the class. But only temporarily.

[3] Soon, parents of the 28 complained to the local school board, refusing to believe their child had cheated. The penalty, all the parents said, was too harsh. And the school board agreed: Pelton was instructed to give the cheaters partial credit for their work. The cheaters were thrilled. The next day, Pelton told the Kansas City Star, "I went to my class and tried to teach the kids, but they were whooping and hollering and saying, 'We don't have to listen to you anymore.'"

[4] Her authority gone, Pelton did the only thing she could: She immediately quit in protest. Most teachers don't. At many high schools and universities, cheating is routine, teacher apathy the norm. A series of studies by Rutgers University professor Donald McCabe found that on most campuses, more than 75 percent of students cheat. And why wouldn't they? According to McCabe, a 1999 survey of 1000 faculty members at 21 colleges found that "one-third of those who were aware of student cheating in their course in the last two years did nothing to address it." In other words, there are far more plagiarists on campus than there are Christine Peltons.

[5] The Internet has made plagiarism particularly tempting. Dozens of websites with names like school-sucks.com offer prewritten term papers for sale at bargain prices. Need 5000 words on Feminist Consciousness and Gender Roles in Pre-Columbian Latin America? It's only a mouse click away.

[6] On the other hand, so is discovery. Technology has made catching cheaters just as easy. Several websites offer software that automatically compares the text of a student's work against a database of thousands of term papers and published books and articles. If there's a match, there's likely plagiarism.