Society trusts teachers and school administrators to deliver a lesson arguably more important than reading and math: Cheating is not only forbidden but dishonorable. How discouraging and frustrating it is, then, to discover yet another instance in which an institution itself has been caught violating the rules.

On Monday, Claremont McKenna College announced that an official there inflated the SAT scores of incoming students to make the school look good in national rankings, including the overhyped lists published annually in U.S. News & World Report. This follows revelations last year of widespread cheating on state standardized tests by public school teachers and administrators in Georgia, New York and Pennsylvania. As a sign of how worrisome the problem has become, the U.S. Department of Education is soliciting public opinion until Feb. 16 on how to stop cheating by schools.

It is bad enough when teachers cheat on tests, but when the cheating is carried out at a college — supposedly an unimpeachable bastion of the disinterested pursuit of pure truth — the notion of honor seems fragile and fleeting indeed.

Do teachers cut students a break if they’re caught cheating on final exams because of academic pressure? No, those students receive a big, fat zero.