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"Sometimes entire answer sheets for work sheets can be found online," she said.

As for tests, suburban high school biology teacher Jason Crean said he has heard about students' texting exam questions to friends who have his class later in the day. In response, he now makes multiple versions of his tests, a step that has doubled or tripled his preparation time.

He said cheating seems to have become a "social obligation" that students strive to meet without considering the harm of their actions - not least to themselves.

"If they learn anything in my class, I want them to learn to do things for themselves," he said. "That's a lesson they have to learn for life, and I don't want them to learn it the hard way after they've left. They need to think and solve problems ... and the technology is taking away from that."

Some are trying to find technological solutions to cheating. The College Board, burned by a scandal earlier this year in which Long Island students were paid to take the SAT for others, will soon require students to provide their photographs - typically by digital upload - before taking the test. The photos will later be sent to the test-taker's high school to thwart any would-be impersonators. The ACT is adopting a similar tactic for those who take the test away from their schools.

Back in the classroom, some teachers rely on turnitin.com, a website that, for $2 per student per year, will check essays against the Internet, 30 million journal articles and 250 million archived student papers to uncover possible plagiarism. Spokesman Chris Harrick said 10,000 schools now use the service.

But Gary Anderson, who teaches English at Fremd High School in Palatine, Ill., said such websites create an atmosphere of mistrust. The better response, he said, is to think up techniques that will foil copying, such as requiring literary essays to include examples from a student's own life.

"You can prevent so much plagiarism and cheating simply by the kind of assignments we do," he said. "A three-page assignment you can find on the Internet isn't an assignment worth doing."

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Math teacher Natalie Jakucyn of Glenbrook South High School in Glenview, Ill., takes a more basic approach - her students must hand in their cell phones before a test - but agrees that imaginative long-term solutions are needed.

"What the educator needs to do is adapt to the age of technology and change the question," she said. "Maybe what (students) are learning should change. Maybe how they're learning should change. Now the challenge to me is to match that technology and say what I'm doing needs to change."

Meanwhile, the temptation to cut corners is likely to remain strong.

Asana Pastel, 16, a junior at Lake Park High School in Roselle, Ill., said digital technology has made cheating so easy that giving answers to friends - even mere Facebook friends - has become an expectation among many students. And Fremd junior Tyler Raap, 16, said the pressure to achieve at his competitive school often overwhelms his peers' sense of ethics.

"Teachers always give you the whole moral thing, but kids just want to get good grades," he said.

Anderman, the Ohio State researcher, said one thing has been proven to cut down on cheating, but installing it would require a sharp cultural change in an educational system that is placing ever more importance on test results.

"The bottom line in our research is pretty simple," he said. "Where teachers are really emphasizing the test, you're more likely to get cheating. When teachers are emphasizing the learning more than the test, you get less cheating."