It used to be funny. University of North Carolina students used to tell an apocryphal story about a student in a large survey class who was caught cheating on his final by a professor. Since UNC's honor code in those days prohibited proctoring by faculty (students had to be trusted to self-police,) all the professor could do was challenge the miscreant to turn himself in.

"Don't you know who I am?" the student asked defiantly.

"I don't care who you are," the prof answered.

"You mean to tell me you don't know who I am?"

"No, it doesn't matter. You need to handle this."

"In that case ..." the anonymous student said, as he shoved his blue book somewhere into the stack of completed exams, flung them into the air, and then fled out the door, knowing he could expect the teacher to dutifully grade all the exams anyway.

Every university has its own stories.

At Harvard, the urban legend has it that a student copied a paper from a roommate on "The Nature of War" and used it in five different classes to get five good grades. Yalies tell of a student who pilfered exams directly out of the university print shop to prepare answers before the test was given.

Somehow, it no longer seems quite as funny as cheating seems to have grown rampant in a culture that requires good grades to get a good job.

In the 1970s, the few studies that existed on the subject indicated that less than half the students in U.S. schools cheated even once. By the 1990s, honest students were in the minority.

In 1992, Rutgers University professor Don L. McCabe surveyed 6,096 students at 31 American colleges and found that 67 percent of the respondents admitted they cheated at least once as an undergraduate.

And there's been a trickle down the educational ladder. Just last week, a study gained national, albeit brief, attention by reporting 64 percent of high school students cheated on a test in the past year, and 38 percent cheated two or more times; that was up from 60 and 35 percent in a 2006 survey.

Michael Josephson, founder of the institute that surveyed 29,760 students at 100 randomly selected high schools nationwide, told the Associated Press he was most disappointed in the numbers concerning theft; one-fifth of the students said they had stolen something from a friend.

"What is the social cost of that?" Josephson asked. "In a society drenched with cynicism, young people can look at it and say 'Why shouldn't we? Everyone else does it.'"

To some, that may be the saddest thing of all.

The cynics are right. Cheating and fraud have penetrated every institution and every strata of American society. Truly cynical cynics will insist that it has always been so, and that we are just now uncovering the naked truth. But the research numbers indicate a true, or rather untruthful, transformation.

The nation's overburdened schools often get the blame for such things. That seems unfair, and myopic.

Teachers are asked to be educators, social workers, computer experts, nurses, police officers and any number of other things in the classroom. Asking them to be priest and moral arbiter is bit much to pile on, and even if they were willing, lawsuits in our litigious society would beat them back. (When Duke caught 32 students cheating in an MBA class, several immediately filed lawsuits to escape punishment.)

In this Sargasso Sea of sagging morals, one group willing to take up the challenge: coaches.

Years ago, Alabama coach Bear Bryant was asked why football was important. "Young people are searching for something," he said. "It's something they can't find in school, anymore, or in their family life, or even, Lord help us, in many churches. But they're going to find it on my football field."

Isaac Marsh, football coach at Chapel Hill High School, echoes those sentiments almost 25 years later.

"Before every season, we sit down with all the coaches and talk about what we need to do that year," Marsh said. "One of the things we talk about is teaching life lessons, about teaching about right and wrong. We don't care what other teams do, we're going to act right, on and off the field."

Marsh, just like coaches as far apart as John Wooden at UCLA and Dean Smith at North Carolina, has found a receptive audience.

"In the long run, kids don't care about the Xs and Os. They want to know you care about them," Marsh said. "They need to feel protected, like in a family. And we are a family."

NCAA studies show that student-athletes graduate at a higher rate than other students. At the high school level, coaches like Marsh and East Chapel Hill basketball coach Ray Hartsfield make it a point to shepherd every senior through the last semester and into a college.

Those sort of efforts pay off. For the student, for the coaches, for society at large.