News of widespread, cellphone-aided cheating on Regents exams broke as my Stuyvesant HS classmates and I were graduating — a reminder of something we’d sooner forget: endemic cheating at our school.

It’s rarely as brazen as in the Regents scandal, which has now led to six students’ suspensions and the cancelation of 65 others’ Regents scores. But lower-grade dishonesty is common — and the evidence isn’t just anecdotal.

In March, Stuyvesant’s student newspaper, The Spectator (where I was the Opinions editor), did a survey on cheating; 2,045 pupils answered. At least 72 percent in each grade admitted to copying homework at some point; 90 percent of seniors said they’d had advance knowledge of test questions at least once a year. And 5 percent of the student body confessed to cheating on the SAT and AP exams.

In total, 80 percent acknowledged participating in some form of academic dishonesty.

During my time on The Spectator’s editorial board, we engaged in many agonized discussions about cheating — at Stuyvesant and elsewhere. The problem defies easy characterization and demands analysis, not demagoguery.

Few of my peers at Stuyvesant wanted to cheat, though a handful got a thrill out of proving that they were smarter than the system — and cheated their whole way through school. For the rest, dishonesty was the only way they could think of to get by. Stuyvesant can be a bleak, impersonal and dispiriting place.

Those of us harboring Ivy League ambitions adopt various strategies. I spent most of junior year on five hours of sleep a night and a cup of coffee. Others turned to Adderall to help them concentrate, buying it from other students. And, yes, many cheated.

There’s no justification for that. But the school culture rationalizes and enables it. Take the petition to reinstate Nayeem Ahsan, the junior at the center of the cheating scandal, which has been signed by over 250 students. One line reads, “Nayeem does not deserve to have his future ripped out of his hands, simply so the administration can set an example.”

While I disagree with that statement, it encapsulates one of the main reasons why students cheat — they see teachers and administrators not as educators, but as enemies.

There is a basis for that us-vs.-them attitude. Due to the intransigence of the teachers’ union, Stuyvesant has scores of sub-par instructors who saddle students with busywork. Feeling a sense of solidarity with one another, some pupils form cheating networks like the one that Ahsan allegedly headed up. As one friend told me, “School is a team effort.”

That’s right: Contrary to Stuyvesant’s popular image as a place full of cutthroats, the majority of cheating occurs in groups. Students pass down old tests from one grade to the next; sometimes one person steals an exam and shares it with a dozen others, who then pool their answers.

Because Stuyvesant lacks any overall community, the cheating network (usually held together by ties of friendship or ethnicity) can become the community for its members, reinforcing negative behavior.

There’s no silver bullet that will wipe out cheating, at Stuyvesant or anywhere in our society. But school officials can take several steps.

The first is making students feel invested in their school. Studies have consistently shown that liberal arts colleges, with their tight-knit communities, are far less susceptible to the scourge of cheating than are more impersonal institutions.

The second is reducing stress — an issue forever discussed at Stuyvesant but never acted upon.

The last is assuring that cheaters do not receive just a slap on the wrist, but punishment that is both predictable and proportional. You can’t break a culture of academic dishonesty unless cheating risks serious consequences.

Daniel Solomon, Stuyvesant ’12, will attend Harvard in the fall.