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Naughty, naughty!.

Well, well, well. Apparently the students at the glorious universities in Victoria have heeded the call so much to be part of the Clever Country they have decided to better their marks by ... cheating.

Yup, instead of turning off the cretin box or avoiding parties, the brains of the future have instead taken on a bit of corporate culture and are taking illegal or dishonest shortcuts towards degrees.

According to a report almost 80 per cent of undergraduates have 'fessed up to some form of not doing the right thing!

That could be working with someone else on what are meant to be individual assignments, handing in old assignments, or even plagiarising information off the Internet.

Tsk, tsk, tsk.

What a naughty pack of little cheaters you are.

Mind you, you have to give some form of credit to the three per cent of students who have gone so far as to hire someone else to sit there exams for them.

Now I reckon this points to two major faults in our society.

The first being that there are not a lot of spare braincells running around at the moment and therefore the university intake standard has been lowered over recent years.

Secondly, it means that in Victoria cheating to get falsely high marks is easier and more acceptable than working harder and stretching the grey matter to its limit, so not only are some students cheating the system, but future employers and themselves as well.

Makes for more depressing thoughts about the future of this country doesn't it?

What is even more upsetting is the fact that 80 per cent of students wouldn't inform those in charge if they knew other students were cheating.

Still, I guess there is a slight positive in that. I mean in the corporate world most graduates would knife their own best friends to move up the corporate ladder more quickly.

Perhaps Victoria's universities could begin new study courses. A Batchelor of Cheating? A Master of Underhandedness? A Doctor of I'm Not Bright Enough to Get Through Normally so I've Bought the Answers Off Someone Else?

I have a better idea. Anyone caught cheating - no matter how trivial - should be thrown out of university and never be allowed to study there again. That would at least try to set some standards and guarantee that letters after a person's name actually mean something.

If there is something that has really got up your nose, let Grumpy Old Coot know at grumpy@webwombat.com