In a new survey of 15,000 university students in five provinces, 53 per cent confess to having cheated in their assignments -- and an astonishing 73 per cent said they cheated in high school.

The study was conducted by the University of Guelph and Rutgers University, and will be published in the Canadian Journal for Higher Education.

"Large numbers of Canadian students report having engaged in a variety of questionable behaviours in the completion of their academic work," said Julia Christensen Hughes in a news release.

Cristensen Hughes is director of the University of Guelph's Teaching Support Services and president of the Society for Teaching and Learning in Higher Education.

Her work on the survey finds:

• 18 per cent of the university undergrads admit to cheating on a test or exam in their current studies.
• 9 per cent of graduate students said they had cheated on a test or exam.
• 58 per cent of the first-year students surveyed said they had cheated on a test or exam in high school by copying from another student without the person's knowledge, helping another student cheat on a test or using "cheat sheets."
• 46 per cent of faculty and 38 per cent of TAs surveyed said they had ignored suspected cases of misconduct, mostly because they didn't think they had the proof to back up their suspicions.

CTV Toronto conducted its own informal survey of students at the Ontario Universities Fair this weekend, and many of them admitted to having done a bit of cheating.

Author John Myers, a professor at the Ontario Institute for Studies in Education, says only a small minority of students are "dishonest" with their cheating. The rest just flub from time to time.

"A large majority just panic," he told CTV News. Pressure and lack of time get to students, and they cheat under difficult circumstances.

"And some of them haven't really been taught the value of doing stuff in your own words."

In her report, Christensen Huges notes many students engage in cheating "simply because they don't believe they're wrong."

She says it's partly a result of student culture:  younger people view their work as more a more collaborative process, rather than adopting the more traditional academic standards of individual achievement.

"Institutions of higher education need to develop comprehensive strategies for dealing with academic misconduct, beginning with the explicit recognition that there is a problem," Christensen Hughes said in the news release.