Cheating on campus has become so commonplace that it fails to attract much student interest, let alone outrage. But a recent scandal at Harvard, in which more than 100 undergraduates are suspected of cheating on a take-home exam last spring, has at least drawn media attention. When some of the best and brightest — at an institution whose motto is Veritas, no less — fail to put stock in academic integrity, you know there’s a problem.

Statistics are slippery — there’s a hazard, after all, in asking students who may be prone to cheat whether they in fact do. According to one poll conducted some years ago by Rutgers University, 68 percent of college students admitted to having cheated. That’s a sharp increase since 1963, when 39 percent of students at nine large public universities admitted to cheating. Whatever the numbers, cheating appears to be not only pervasive but widely tolerated.

Many blame high-stakes competition among students under pressure to succeed academically. Others point to the role of technology, specifically the Internet. The more online tools college students were allowed to use to complete an assignment, the more likely they were to copy the work of others, according to a study cited in The New York Times in September. The web serves up canned essays and makes plagiarism all too tempting.

Collaborative group work, favored by many teachers because it is thought to prepare students for the workplace, may also increase the likelihood that students will cheat. In fact, some Harvard students under investigation for cheating have said that collaboration was encouraged, which led them to believe that sharing notes, consulting graduate teaching fellows for help and working together to answer the take-home test questions was OK. That assumption was widespread even though the professor told students not to discuss the exam with others.

Either some students have difficulty following instructions or they don’t have a clue what cheating is. Justice Potter Stewart famously said of pornography, “I know it when I see it.” Apparently many young people can’t say the same about cheating. And those who do recognize what it is don’t necessarily think it’s wrong. Many say they think cheating is necessary to get ahead. “The ethical muscles have atrophied,” Harvard education professor Howard Gardner told The Times.

It’s time for ethical boot camp. If the muscles have atrophied, then who better than the nation’s educational institutions to build them back up? More colleges and universities, to say nothing of high schools, need to help students understand what constitutes cheating and impose tough sanctions for dishonesty, including suspension and dismissal. Donald L. McCabe, a professor at Rutgers Business School who leads research on cheating, says strictly enforced honor codes tend to decrease cheating incidents. Yet relatively few schools — about 100 nationwide — have honor codes. Harvard is not among them.

We are under no illusion that strictly enforced honor codes would put an end to cheating — any more than alcohol policies have put a stop to binge drinking. But if colleges and universities spent as much time talking about the moral implications of cheating as they do talking about the health risks of drinking, more students might learn something about academic integrity and why it actually matters. The ho-hum response to cheating among many students reflects a depressing moral decline in a country that also overlooks bad behavior in the boardroom, locker room and political back room. In the end, of course, it’s all connected.

— The Valley News of Lebanon (N.H.)