high-tech listening devices
© National PoliceSpain's National Police caught up with a gang who supplied high-tech listening devices to students in exams, giving them the answers.

Bangalore - A new study released by the National Bureau of Economic Research finds that people who cheat are more likely to want government jobs. The study by researchers from Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania included hundreds of students in Bangalore, India. Study results suggest that one of the contributing forces behind government corruption could be who gets into government work in the first place, according to an LA Times report.

"If people have the view that jobs in government are corrupt, people who are honest might not want to get into that system," said Rema Hanna, an associate professor at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard. To combat that problem, governments may need to find new ways to screen people seeking jobs, she said.

One experiment during the study involved more than 600 college seniors in India. Students were asked to roll a die in private and report what number they got. Each participant rolled the die 42 times and got paid more for higher numbers. Researchers could tell whether the numbers each person reported were significantly different than equal amounts of random die rolls. Those who reported consistently high numbers were allegedly cheating.

Cheating was unbridled as more than a third of students claimed scores that fell in the top 1% of the predicted distribution, said researchers. However, "students who apparently cheated were 6.3% more likely to say they wanted to work in government," according to the report.