Parents Fund Kids' Cheating Habits

When Nicole Kristal couldn't make a living making music in Hollywood, she tried her hand at an older profession. Well, sort of.

"I was an academic prostitute," she says. "That's harsh, not really.

"I mean, I sold my mind for money."

As CBS News Correspondent Byron Pitts reports, Kristal's "clients" paid her to cheat.

At $40-an-hour, she wrote college admission essays for high school students and term papers for college seniors.

One kid, she says, would've failed his class without her help.

"He flunked all the tests," says Kristal.

And where did these kids get the money to pay her?

"It's not the kids, it's the parents, actually," she says.

Asked what it says about our society that there's a market for her services, Kristal says: "I think it shows how competitive our society's become and that it's become mostly about status, not education."

So who's to blame?

Can you spell Enron and Major League Baseball?

For students the message is becoming increasingly clear: Don't just win, win at any cost.

"One of the main reasons students cheat is they look around and see all their peers cheating and the message becomes, 'To remain competitive I've got to do the same thing,'" says John Barrie, founder of Turnitin.com, a company that tracks plagiarism for schools around the world.

Barrie knows the profile.

"We receive over 40,000 student papers every single day from all over the world," says Barrie.

When he created Turnitin.com, Barrie thought he'd put a stop to kids cheating, at least off the Internet.

"I refer to this as a mosaic term paper - a student has taken information from two student papers and from this Shakespeare Web site," Barrie says of one creative cheater's tactics.

But Barrie admits what students already know: The solution isn't only software, because the beauty of buying an "original" paper is that it's untraceable.

"When girls started handing me $50 to write a paper that took me under an hour, it was hard to say no," says Alex Tava.

Now a freshman in college, Tava cheated for classmates at a private high school in New Jersey. She says parents were willing to pay for good grades just like any other expense.

"They just got money from their parents," says Tava, of her "clients." "They got new cars from their parents, they got new shoes from their parents, they got new purses from their parents."

Tava was just one more expense in high school.

Janet Tava is still stunned by her daughter's revelation, but not surprised students were eager to cheat.

She says her daughter didn't see it as cheating.

"They never do because there's an entitlement that comes with this generation," says Janet Tava. "They don't see any of it as cheating.

"Credit cards are entitled, good cars are entitled and good grades are entitled. They are expected to be perfect."

As for Kristal, one of her "clients" graduated from college a few weeks ago. His career goal?

"He said that some day that he would be the governor of California and if I need a job he would hire me," says Kristal.

Kristal has stopped writing papers, but there are still plenty of people willing to take the cash so someone else will get the credit.