With term papers and exams piling up, students face pressure to produce a lot of work in not much time.

For students who have kept up with assigned reading and begun long-term projects early, reading period can be a time of polishing papers, doing the suggested reading, and reviewing course material.

For others, however, panic and desperation set in. Under deadline pressure, some students may become careless about citing sources, or even knowingly cheat to make the grade.

In 1993-4, the Administrative Board acted on 25 cases of academic dishonesty, ranging from willful cheating and plagiarism to sloppy citing.

Few examples of plagiarism are as obvious as the one English department Teaching Fellow Lisa K. Hamilton says she experienced a few years ago in one of her sections.

"It was fairly blatant," she says. "The student just retyped a whole article about an author about whom I knew quite a bit."

But most cases of academic dishonesty are harder to detect.

Assistant Professor Andrew P. Metrick, head tutor of the economics department, estimates that his department sends about two or three students each year to the Ad Board for incidents of academic dishonesty.

But Metrick says the Ad Board sees only a fraction of the academic dishonesty that actually occurs.

"Like all crime, really, more goes on than you actually detect," he says.

And even when academic dishonesty is suspected, there is often not enough evidence to support a serious investigation, Metrick says.

Last year he received an anonymous letter stating that there was cheating on an economics exam. Metrick says that the department combed through the exams and found a little evidence to support the letter, but "not enough to go on."

"Our methods of detection are just not sharp enough," he says.

Metrick says he believes that professors often deal with cases of academic dishonesty on their own, another indication that more cheating goes on than the Ad Board actually sees.

University rules require instructors to alert the Ad Board at the slightest suspicion of academic dishonesty--a policy Metrick supports--but he says he suspects that many professors deal with students on a personal basis.