Cheating heart: does capitalism teach people to break the rules?

• Author: Sanchez, Julian
• Position: Book Review

The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, by David Callahan, New York: Harcourt, 304 pages, $26

GLEN WHITMAN, AN economics professor at California State University, Northridge, is the kind of teacher cheaters dread. Soon after he began teaching, he realized that Scantron tests--the multiple choice fill-in-the-bubble type--were especially tempting for unscrupulous students. The tests are graded by machine, seldom scrutinized directly by the teacher. And sometimes an incomplete erasure or a smudge will lead to a right answer being marked wrong, making it easy for a cheater to make a few retroactive "corrections" and plead mistreatment by the grading gadget. But as the first student to try that stunt discovered, to his surprise and horror, Whitman scans or photocopies all his students' tests before returning them.

He's equally hawkish about plagiarism. When he gets that tingle in the back of his head about a paper--too professional, too erudite, too different from the student's usual style--he begins punching phrases from the paper into Google, which often turns up the source of student lifting. When that doesn't work, says Whitman, he heads over to Turnitin.com, a site that helps professors identify unoriginal material in papers as easily as students can cut and paste it. Largely because of new technologies, cheating is easier than ever before. But it's hard to know the extent to which students really are cheating more than they used to, partly because it's easier than it ever has been for astute teachers to catch those who do cheat.

This isn't a terribly abstruse point. It's one of a half-dozen theories any academic, asked to explain either the fact or the appearance of more prevalent cheating, would be likely to come up with. You'd expect it--and the others--to be discussed in some detail in any 300-page book on the nature of cheating. But as David Callahan proves in The Cheating Culture, you'd be wrong.

Callahan's book comes at a time When Americans are particularly concerned with cheating--and what to do about it. The avalanche of stories revealing that corporate accounting statements and front-page articles in The New York Times contain more creative fiction than the average issue of McSweeney's has left many of us suspecting that the old '60s slogan "never trust anyone over 30" got it exactly half right. Executives lie about corporate earnings; presidents lie about blowjobs (among other things); even Martha Stewart is no longer above suspicion.

A book that provided a unified field theory of cheating would be especially welcome just...