The internet is bringing a distinctly high-tech flavour to the ancient art of fooling the teacher. For many post-modem students, the "download your workload" method has become the rule and not the exception.

With little effort, comprehension or creativity, students can download somebody else's work and use it as their own. This is the world of new-age plagiarism, where cybercheating has become a popular substitute for learning.

There are websites that specialise in academic fraud. These Internet enablers earn huge advertising revenue from their sites and have addresses such as schoolsucks.com and geniuspapers.com.

Services vary greatly in quality and price. Some charge nothing - simply offering a range of projects or essays for the student on a budget. Others require a credit card to browse.

C-dickens.com, for example, makes sure that the Hard Times are over for many students, with "full-time professionals trained to write research papers on a wide variety of topics".

"Have a deadline?" asks one of the more prosaic sites, Cheaters Always Win! "Click here for research papers online." This site offers the academic pickpocket links to 125 similar services, including essayworld.com, which offers papers from anthropology to psychology, and averages more than 55,000 visitors per month during the school year.

Recent reports in the US suggest that cheating there is spiralling out of control. Research at the world-renowned University of California, Berkeley, found 130 cases of recycled writing taken from various websites in 300 essays submitted for a science course during the 1999-2000 school year.

This survey was conducted by an interested party: the creators of a product called plagiarism.org, a web-based device that many US colleges are using in the fight against cybercheating. This system can detect unoriginal material by comparing assignments submitted by students against web-based and other electronic sources.

So, has cheating on the island of saints and scholars become a grade-A problem? Well, it would be foolish to assume that our second-level students aren't downloading homework from the web. And to assume that teachers are savvy enough to know when they've been had would also be unwise.

But it's third-level institutions that are mostly at risk: cheating in the form of plagiarism is most likely to take place with continuous assessment, where students have assignments or projects to do. And most students have free access to the Internet.

Dr Dermot Douglas, registrar and head of examinations at Tallaght IT, says that a small percentage of third-level students will always cheat.

"Some students feel that they can get away with cheating," says Dr Douglas. "And if they're not caught, a cheating culture will develop. But if you police the problem strenuously, and confront suspected breaches of academic integrity, you can then minimise the problem and students will realise that it's not profitable to cheat.

"Of course there's always a small percentage of students who will keep taking the risk."

Many Irish colleges say that cheating doesn't take place or that only a very small percentage of students cheat. Yet student surveys on the matter or solid cheating statistics are unavailable from our third-level institutions. So what do the students themselves have to say?

From a sample of 50 college students interviewed for this article, 17 admitted to turning in work that was not their own. Eight students admitted to storing cog notes on programmable calculators during class examinations for small credits.

A second-year arts student from UCD said she believes that cheating isn't just practised by a few subversive individuals and that more and more students have joined in simply to keep up with their competition - that is, cheaters who get away with it.

"There's pressure to get into college, and when you get there, cheating can be a tempting path if you want to succeed. With the web, for example, you're anonymous and you can access top-class material quickly and easily. I don't think students care about learning anymore; they only care about grades and getting a degree," said the 20-year-old Dubliner.

However, according to Dr Carolne Hussey, registrar and head supervisor of examinations at UCD, this sort of cheating hasn't really arrived on Irish shores just yet.

"I recognise that cheating using the Internet is a threat, but by no means is it a problem at UCD. The majority of material from these websites is of American origin and usually not suitable for our students' purposes. Our academic staff is very vigilant and is aware of the threat the Internet holds, but I haven't had any cases of this type of cheating reported to me," Dr Hussey says.

For the colleges, there's no room for complacency: their integrity, and the value of their qualifications, are at stake.

But why do students cheat? Many psychologists believe that the main factor behind cheating may be a matter of conformity. Social pressure from friends to flirt with danger and try to get away with it may be encouraging many students.

People have always sought unfair advantage over others in our society. Politicians often vote according to the wishes of lobbyists instead of constituents, our Olympic athletes take performance enhancing drugs, and our best and brightest take academic shortcuts. Does anybody care?

Well they should, says Dr Douglas, because if "cheaters are allowed to profit in our schools and universities, then we are building a society where honesty does not pay".