Maybe you"d think this was the obscure hangout of professors exchanging ideas.

             Well you"d be wrong. You would find typical yet tightly wound college students -- burdened with homework, pressed for time -- cheating their hearts out with ingenious amorality on schoolsucks.com.

             "SAVE MY LIFE!!!!" one student screams across the yawning void of cyberspace, his pathetic plea posted on an electronic bulletin board. "Send me a 2,000 word essay on character analysis in Shakespeare"s Hamlet now!!! I WILL DO ANYTHING FOR IT.".

             And somebody does respond, offering a report on Hamlet that they assembled a semester earlier. The students dissappear into the privacy of e-mail, leaving onlookers only to wonder what sort of transaction was.

             taking place in the name of a passing grade.

             Obviously Shakespeare"s sentiment "to thine ownself be true" just doesn"t apply to the college student. According to Michael Josephson, founder of an institute for teaching ethics, 63% of college-goers cheat on tests.

             or term papers.

             Using the internet to conjure up the evening"s homework isn"t a novel thing to do anymore. To some students, it isn"t even cheating. With sites like schoolsucks.com it has simply evolved into an institution, a pillar.

             of education, and an endless archive of cut and paste essay components. You could call it cooperative learning - students trying to WWW dot their way out of an assignment.

             One student named Mike Holmes, who attended Clarkson University, says the key to passing off a pieced- together term paper is concocting a bogus but authoritative-sounding bibliography. He said, "The Romans copied from the Greeks, so why shouldn"t we copy from the geeks? Everybody does it . . . A couple of clicks and that was it.".

             Sacrificing one"s integrity for a grade is hardly worth it. Sadly, in our society people decide that what matters is that I get ahead, that I win, or that I get an "A+.