All of us (OK, some of us) have done it at one point or another. Hiding a phone with test answers on it, or just plain copying off your neighbor. It's one thing to cheat in a calculus or Psych 101 class. But an ethics course?

It's in the damn name of the class.

Apparently that didn't stop 43 Dartmouth College athletes, though, who have been implicated in a wide-ranging academic dishonesty case at the university involving a class called (wait for it)... "Sports, Ethics, Religion."

The Dartmouth newspaper reports that the course's teacher, Randall Balmer, suspected something was up when he saw a discrepancy between the number of students who digitally submitted answers to in-class questions and the actual number of students in his October 30 class.

Each of the 272 students in class was given an electronic clicker device registered in their name to assess participation. The course, the most popular one on the Dartmouth campus this term, allows students to earn points for submitting answers to select in-class questions and then folds those answers into the class's online grade book. The idea is for Balmer to be able to track responses in real time.

Nearly 70 percent of the students in the class are varsity athletes, who are the main target audience for the course. A couple of weeks ago, Balmer started suspecting that students were skipping class and sending their clickers in with friends to get points for attendance. So, on October 30, he measured how many people were actually there by asking a question they could click on, then handing out a paper version of the same question.

Oops. Turns out when he and the TA's handed out the sheets there were 43 students who said they were present who were not actually there. Attendance and participation account for 15 percent of a student's grade in the class.

It appears Balmer was on guard because he was aware that some cheating had gone on during the class's midterm, which was offered online and had specific instructions warning students not to click out of the exam to Google answers.

It was unclear at press time if Balmer will remove the 43 from the class and if they will face further disciplinary action.

"I wanted to appeal to their interest, have a positive experience, allow them to succeed and build on that for their remainder of Dartmouth," Balmer told the paper. "Obviously it’s a great disappointment to me that many of the students, including many athletes, subverted the whole experience."