With a motto of “Cheaters never prosper … but it’s still better than failing,” the Blur of Insanity Cheating Tricks website is just one of many to condone what recent studies have shown is a problematic prevalence of cheating among college students nationwide.

Research conducted by Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University, also the founder and first president of the Center for Academic Integrity, has found that on most campuses nationwide, more than 75 percent of students confessed to cheating in some form.

“[There is] more emphasis on some higher-profile cases that involve what we consider to be technology-based forms of cheating,” said Diane Waryold, executive director of the center, adding that the amount of cheating has increased slightly in years past.

With the Internet becoming an increasingly dominant staple in academics, new forms of cheating, such as plagiarism, are becoming more common in the college scene.

“It makes it easy because you can just cut and paste. There’s a sense that if it’s on the Internet, it belongs to everyone,” said Linda Trevino, Pennsylvania State University professor of management and organization and an expert on academic dishonesty.

Both Waryold and Trevino cited various aspects of college life that could push students toward cheating. As Waryold noted, “All kinds of excuses are found.”

For example, some students cannot handle the pressure of the rigors of academia, especially with increasingly demanding standards for medical- and graduate-school admittance.

“There’s a lot of pressure. [Students] panic,” Waryold said. “Others cheat out of desperation [because] they don’t understand something or out of fear of failure.”

Some, however, simply see cheating as an acceptable mode of work because their peers do it, an attitude Trevino said is the most forceful and dominant rationale behind cheating.

“It becomes a norm in a culture on a particular campus,” she said, adding laziness and last-minute deadlines as other factors behind cheating practices.

For University of Wisconsin senior Rachel, who prefers to keep her last name disclosed, and student of the School of Human Ecology, her decision to cheat sprouted from a lack of time. Thus, she took advantage of the many opportunities for cheating her online course afforded her, a move she now regrets.

In so doing, Rachel copied work from a friend who had taken the class several weeks before. Numerous other classmates did the same, causing instructors to look into the matter. All those who cheated were caught and received no credit for the class; in addition, the incident is marked in Rachel’s permanent student file, and if caught cheating again, she would face serious punishment.

“It was a bad situation all around,” she said, noting that the embarrassment was the worst repercussion of her actions. “They can always catch you no matter what.”

The demands of college, however, are generally not the sole reason students cheat. As Trevino noted, the cheating habit are generally picked up in high school, and once students see its usefulness, they carry the habit into the college scene.

In response to the growing threat of cheating, universities nationwide have taken decisive action in hopes of deterring students from resorting to such practices.

One method is to update and stress academic honor codes, a tactic McCabe has found helps to reduce the prevalence of cheating.

“There’s a real sort of revival in the honor-code trend,” Trevino said.

As his studies from the past decade have shown, universities that strictly enforce honor codes generally have between one-third and one-half lower amounts of cheating on tests compared to universities that do not stress such academic integrity. Similarly, the level of cheating on written assignments is one-fourth to one-third lower.

In addition, Trevino noted that enforcing an honor code is not only beneficial to the college community, but also to the character of students.

“It teaches you what it’s like to live in a community of trust,” she said, adding that students who attend colleges with such policies generally take the code’s ideals with them in later endeavors.

In addition to implementing anti-plagiarism detection devices in their classes, professors are also starting to take a firmer stand in their students’ actions, Waryold said. “Professors are entering into an arms race and policing more,” she said.