As a researcher of academic integrity, Dr. Don McCabe faces a difficult task.

“I’m asking students to be honest about their dishonesty,” the Rutgers University professor of management and global business said.

McCabe traveled to Lyon College Feb. 28 to provide his thoughts on academic cheating and share results from his years of research in both college and high schools.

Over the last 17 years, McCabe has done extensive research on college cheating, surveying more than 150,000 students at over 150 colleges and universities in the U.S. and Canada. He has also surveyed over 40,000 high school students in the United States during the last six years.

McCabe’s work has been published widely in business, education and sociology journals and he is founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity, a consortium of more than 350 colleges and universities that are joined in a united effort to promote academic integrity among college and university students. The center is based at Clemson University.

McCabe surveyed Lyon College students in 1999 and found that like most other colleges cheating does happen on the small campus. He said of the 51 students surveyed at Lyon 20 percent admitted to cheating on tests, while 24 percent said they cheated on written assignments.

Nationally, students reported a 70 percent cheating rate on tests and 60 percent on written assignments.

“There is a lot of cheating going on,” McCabe said. “It’s widespread.”

McCabe said the Internet has raised several new aspects of cheating. In a survey of 2,000 students last year, McCabe said 39 percent of students reported primarily using the Internet to cheat with only two percent using hard copy materials. Seventeen percent of students said they used both the Internet and printed materials to cheat.

He said most students do not feel “cutting and pasting” portions of text into a term paper is cheating. He also said many students note they cheat because the penalties to getting caught are not that great.

Lyon does have an honor code, and McCabe said that is an important step to curbing academic cheating. He said another way to decrease cheating is instituting stiffer penalties for anyone caught cheating and reminding faculty to be vigilant when it comes to turning in suspected cheaters.

“The power of honor codes is eroding,” he said. “I think it is important that there is some community responsibility.”