News that dozens of community college students in the San Francisco Bay Area may have been hitting their checkbooks rather than textbooks in a cash-for-grades scam highlighted an academic dilemma: What to do about cheaters?

College admissions officials say most students are honest. Still, the problem of shamming scholars, from juiced-up resumes to purloined prose, has prompted some administrators to start double-checking the veracity of student applications.

The idea of students shirking their way through college doesn’t surprise John Barrie, who runs an anti-plagiarism Web site called Turnitin.com.

“It’s become easier; it’s become a lot more prevalent,” he says. “It’s the ‘end justifies the means’ world these days.”

One of the latest cheating cases came at Diablo Valley and Los Medanos colleges in the Bay Area, where officials believe dozens of students paid as much as $600 to have their grades changed on the Contra Costa County Community College District’s computer.

The scheme was discovered in January 2006 and may go back to 2000, officials say. As many as 60 students may be involved and administrators believe as many as 400 grades were changed, some more than once.

The scam began soon after a new management system was installed and a student employee figured out how to change grades and later told others, the Contra Costa Times reported. Many suspected cheaters went on to transfer to four-year colleges, including some University of California campuses.

Prosecutors, who are considering whether to file charges, declined to comment on the pending investigation.

Scott Viebranz, a chief sales officer at Krolls security firm whose Global Academic Verification division vets applications for a number of top-ranked schools, says he can’t say empirically whether college cheats are on the rise. But “my opinion is that as the competition for these top-rated schools has become greater and as those positions have become more coveted, that there may be more of an impetus to fabricate.”