Answers to the history exam written on the inside of chewing gum wrappers? Math formulas scrawled on the palm of the hand? Who are you, Andy Hardy?

Forget about the lame, the passe, the low-tech. Modern students put their cell phones, PDAs and the Internet to use in ways previous generations of lazy, ethically hazy students could only dream about.

A cell phone can be used to take a picture of an exam, which is then e-mailed to an accomplice on the outside who sends the answers back as text messages. Tricky mathematical formulas can be entered into a BlackBerry for future reference. And term papers come together quickly when entire passages of material can be lifted from the Internet.

College professors and administrators are discovering just how creative some students can be.

"If they'd just spend that time studying," says Ron Yasbin, dean of the University of Nevada, Las Vegas College of Sciences, who learned about that cell phone gambit firsthand a few years ago.

But, he cautions, cheating involves "a minority of students."

Phil Burns, assistant director of UNLV's Office of Student Conduct, agrees. The office, which deals with cases of academic misconduct by students, receives about 150 cases each year, Burns says, a typical number for a school of UNLV's size.

In fact, the problem has always existed, but "it's just more sophisticated today," says Jennifer Cox, instruction librarian at UNLV's Lied Library.

New technologies have "made cheating much easier, or appear much easier, to students," Burns says.

In the case of plagiarism, claiming someone else's work, the task has evolved from a time-consuming hunt at the library for relevant materials to a leisurely session at home using the Web to find thousands of writings from across the world.

Burns says plagiarism represents about 70 percent of the referrals his office receives. Adding to the problem, Yasbin notes, is the popular misconception that anything that's online is fair game. The Internet may have "done a lot to blur the line between what is plagiarism and what isn't," he adds.

In the same vein, finding somebody to write a term paper for another student used to require at least some legwork and a few furtive discussions. Today, Cox says, pre-written or custom-written term papers on just about any topic can be found online and purchased with just a few clicks of the mouse.

Meanwhile, portable electronic devices help to streamline the mechanics of cheating. Some of today's cell phones, personal digital assistants and calculators are "almost like miniature computers," Yasbin says.

In the Clark County School District, students are banned from having cell phones in the classroom, according to Sue Daellenbach, the district's academic manager for assessment and accountability.

But, Daellenbach says, teachers have come across cases in which students taking state proficiency exams tried to use cell phone text messages to get answers from friends.

"It's a whole new world," Daellenbach says. "But I don't think things are any worse than they've ever been."

Burns has been surprised during his eight years in UNLV's student conduct office to discover that students who commit "the intentional, egregious acts of (academic) misconduct are not those students who are hanging on by their fingernails."

Instead, Burns continues, it's the A-minus student who resorts to cheating to get an A.

"It's the pressure to succeed, to get a scholarship, to get into grad school, to get that six-figure salary," he explains. "They need to be perfect, or at least in their minds they need to be perfect."

Some students caught cheating claim they didn't know that what they were doing was wrong, Burns says, although "if I catch a student going on a Web site who has bought a paper and slapped his name on it, that's pretty cut-and-dried."

UNLV students who are found cheating can be hit with anything from a warning by the instructor to an F in the course to expulsion from an academic program. Usually, Burns says, the response is more about education than punishment, teaching the student why what he or she did is inappropriate.

Cox agrees with that tack.

"We have to make sure we're not just assuming a student knows what the issues are and what (citing) techniques are," she says.

On the other hand, Burns says, intentional high-tech cheating calls for a different response.

"To be honest, those are the ones, I think, where you flunk that class, (and) where, if you're in a high enough level class, they may be out of their major, or if you're a grad student you may be out of the program."

For instructors, short-circuiting high-tech cheating means adopting a few new tricks. For example, a teacher might detect plagiarism by entering phrases from a student's paper into a search engine, or by using computer programs that compare passages in a student paper to previously written papers about the same topic.

Some instructors "actually require all term papers to come back electronically and run them through this software," Yasbin notes.

"Plagiarism is kind of the easiest thing to catch," Burns says.

An instructor also might ban cell phones, PDAs and other electronic devices in the classroom on exam days, Yasbin says, or require that students use only specific, very basic, calculators during exams.

At the same time, the teacher must keep an eye out for new refinements of older classics, too. For example, Yasbin learned that it's not a bad idea to have teaching assistants check out nearby restrooms before an exam begins.

For that addition to his academic playbook, Yasbin can thank a student at another university who made two trips to the restroom during one of his exams. Yasbin sent a teaching assistant into the restroom and found that the student was excusing herself to check out the notes she had left there.

And, here, Yasbin jokes, "I thought she had a tiny bladder."