Faced with a surge in cheating ahead of final exams this month, officials at Cal State Northridge and local community colleges are adopting high-tech solutions and improving traditional vigilance to snare unethical students looking for that easy A.

Mirroring national trends, CSUN has reported a 100 percent increase in cheating incidents over the past five years. Pierce and other community colleges don't keep precise statistics, but say the problem is growing and has been exacerbated by the Internet and handheld gadgets.

Today, cheating students photograph test questions with cell-phone cameras, text-message answers to each other during exams and copy-and-paste whole term papers off the Internet.

"These students are so creative, we have to keep on our toes all the time," said Betty Odello, chairwoman of Pierce College's ethics committee and chairwoman of the college's philosophy and sociology department.

Thousands of students are cramming for the final exam season that begins this month and extends into June at area universities and community colleges.

Expulsions for cheating are rare and most cases are handled directly between the student and the professor, educators say.

To combat the problem, colleges are using software that scans term papers for plagiarism, restricting the use of cell phones and other gadgets and handing out multiple versions of the same exam to trick cheaters.

Professors also are checking student IDs to deter "ringers" -- smart students who'll take tests for others -- and collecting the blue books that students bring to class for a test and then handing them out to different students.

Students say such measures, plus a new generation of more-vigilant professors, have raised the stakes by making it much harder to cheat.

"Most of the time, they walk around the room (during exams)," noted one 29-year-old senior, who asked not to be named. "It's been a while since I've seen a professor give out a test and then sit back and read the newspaper."

Still, greater competition to get the top grades, combined with a rise in high school cheating, is making the practice more widespread at universities and colleges, experts said.

In fact, more students are arriving at college having already perfected the art of cheating in high school. According to a 2002 survey by the Los Angeles-based Joseph and Edna Josephson Institute of Ethics, nearly 75 percent of 10,000 high school students polled said they had cheated on an exam at least once. In 1992, the figure was 61 percent.

National polls have found that about three-quarters of college students confess to cheating at least once. Hoping to shame unethical students into giving it up and to keep the honest on the straight and narrow, some schools have even adopted "Honor Codes" that students must sign as a pledge not to cheat.

But the cheating goes on.

LACCD board President Mona Field, who also teaches at Glendale Community College, said one of her Glendale colleagues discovered students in the back of a large lecture hall photographing a test with their cell phones to pass on to other students.

Michael Neubauer, CSUN faculty senate president and coordinator of CSUN's developmental math program, once caught a student who had copied questions Neubauer had said would be on a test into his calculator, which had text capabilities.

Not all students rely on high-tech gadgetry.

Pierce's Odello said she had heard of students signaling each other the correct answers to multiple-choice exams by tapping their feet in one case and in another leaving M&M candies on their desk to signal the answers -- red for A, green for B, and so on.

Gary Kovnat, a biology professor at Los Angeles Valley College, spotted a student with two scannable test forms, one folded. When Kovnat unfolded the form, explaining that it wouldn't go through the machine that way, he found "three chapters worth of lecture notes written on it in really small letters."

Educators said the old motto -- that students are only cheating themselves -- doesn't hold. Cheaters are also cheating society.

"I understand the pressure and the difference an A or an A minus might make in getting into medical school or law school, but I don't want to be driving over the bridge built by the student who cheated on his final bridge-building exam," said Robert J. Naples, assistant vice chancellor and dean of students at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Naples said his office sees about 300 cases a year, but added that the actual number is a lot higher because most cases are resolved by the professor.

John Barrie, CEO and president of iParadigms, an Oakland-based company that markets Turnitin.com, a proprietary software used by CSU and UC campuses to screen term papers for plagiarism, warns that the real problem is further down the road.

"We're producing a generation of citizens who, No. 1, can't critically think themselves out of a paper bag, and No. 2, have a very shaky ethical foundation," Barrie said. "I don't want to live in a society of Enron employees."