MILWAUKEE, Wis. – Sometimes, pure dumb luck saved him.

Take his freshman year at Marquette University, when he and a buddy turned in the same paper, which neither had written, to separate sections of an introductory English course taught by different teachers.

His friend got caught for cheating and earned an F.

He got an A, along with the teacher’s written comment, “Great paper!”

Now, he is a senior in the business school, and cheating remains a habit, though primarily in courses he doesn’t care much about – electives or general classes such as theology and ethics. Ripping off papers from Web sites is a favorite method.

“I don’t feel guilty,” said the student, who asked not to be identified. “I’m just trying to get by.”

Thanks largely to the Internet, cheating has become much easier – and easier to catch. New technology has spawned a multimillion-dollar industry of swindlers and those who police them, and forced professors to turn to creative methods of deterring and finding charlatans.

It’s vexing for faculty because students often don’t realize what they’re doing is wrong, or simply don’t care.

Donald McCabe, founding president of the Center for Academic Integrity at Duke University and a leading expert on academic dishonesty, has surveyed more than 50,000 students on cheating since 1990. He says it is a growing problem.

In 1999, he surveyed 2,100 students on 21 campuses, and found that 75 percent said they had cheated at some level in college during the past year. In 1999, 10 percent of students McCabe surveyed said they’d plagiarized off the Internet; in a 2001 survey, 41 percent said so.

Part of the growth in cheating may have nothing to do with increased numbers of cheaters, he said, but may be because “students today are less reluctant to admit they’ve cheated.”

The ease of copying off the Internet probably contributes to the lax attitude.

Thanks to technology, cheating and counterefforts – largely revolving around plagiarism – are a booming sector. Search engines such as Google can find over a million resources for students trying to buy term papers, some of which sell for more than $10 a page. The sites, such as FastPapers.com or EssayTown.com, offer thousands of papers on subject areas from oceanography to ethics.

On the other end are companies such as iParadigms, which offers a special Internet-based program called Turnitin to thousands of subscribing academic institutions. The program scans student papers and attempts to match them up to billions of documents it has stored – including obscure journal articles and whatever is available online.

The company got started in the late 1990s and earns in the double-digit millions. Its client base – representing more than 50 countries – is expanding rapidly.

John Barrie, founder of iParadigms, said the company’s goal is more to prevent cheating than to catch it.

“One of the more counterintuitive observations I’ve had is that it’s not primarily the lower-achieving students that are doing this,” he said. “It’s the high-achieving students that have the most to gain. It’s a pretty bleak picture regarding our future leaders.”

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Sean Currie, a junior at Marquette, has seen his share of cheating. The main reason for it, he said, is pressure to do well.

“If you don’t get a 4.0 or a 3.5, you’re going to die old and lonely in a gutter,” Currie said. The 20-year-old added that the smartest cheaters don’t copy directly off the Web, but steal ideas.

The Marquette business student who asked not to be named said that while time constraints played a role in his cheating efforts, a lack of desire to do the work did, too. “Sometimes, you’re lazy and it’s late and you have to hand it in the next day, so you cut and paste.”

The deception upsets many. “I do all of my work myself,” said Jacqueline Lorenz, 23, a first-year law student at Marquette. “I’m under just as much pressure as they are, and I worked my way through college.”

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Universities have a variety of approaches to dealing with academic misconduct. Some require all cases to be reported to special committees, while others primarily let faculty deal with the matter. Some have strict honor codes, while others rely on student conduct guidelines. The severity of the punishments can vary dramatically, too, from expulsion to a lower grade.

At Marquette, there’s no central system of tracking offenses, though administrators say they haven’t seen a change in frequency, even though they’re unsure what the frequency is.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a school of 41,552 students, only about 100 to 150 cases of academic misconduct are formally reported to the Student Advocacy & Judicial Affairs unit each year, while countless others are handled at the faculty or departmental level. Professors who choose to pursue cases beyond the classroom may find it difficult.

For many professors, deterring cheating is more attractive than trying to catch it.

While the threat of using services such as Turnitin – not to mention basic search engines – helps, many professors use more creative methods, some dating back to the pre-Web era.

They use multiple versions of exams. They issue calculators during tests to prevent students from bringing in preprogrammed ones.

Some ban food and drink during tests (imagine: answers written on a coffee cup and hidden by a slipcover). Others let all the students use a notecard or have access to old exams.

Who cheats?

Not necessarily who you might think, according to John Barrie, founder of iParadigms, a company that helps schools identify plagiarism. “One of the more counterintuitive observations I’ve had is that it’s not primarily the lower-achieving students that are doing this. It’s the high-achieving students that have the most to gain,” he says.