Corrupt students

Corruption starts at a very young age. Unless teachers stop looking the other way, students will grow up thinking that cheating is normal behavior.

Let us take college students. College students cheat. That sounds like a gross generalization, and it is. There are, indeed, a few college students that do not cheat. There are those that, despite the examples of their classmates, are satisfied with lower grades as long as they have not cheated on exams or assignments.

A huge number of college students, however, would rather get good grades earned dishonestly than bad grades earned honestly.

How do students cheat? The example from the movie The Emperor’s Club is the old-fashioned way, namely, to write down data somewhere within reach for reference during exams. A cursory glance at student desks in our own classrooms should reveal all sorts of data (called “crib notes”) useful to a student, such as formulas, dates, terms, or mnemonic devices.

How can a teacher fight this kind of cheating? Just suddenly rearrange the seating arrangement, so that students do not sit where they think they were going to. Ask all the students to deposit all their bags and notebooks somewhere in the room, thus depriving them of their carefully prepared microscopic memory enhancers. Have test papers that are completely self-contained, so students need only a pencil or ballpen with them as they take the exam. In extreme cases, examine palms and forearms, where notes could be written.

More complex ways of cheating, however, are now available to students. The cellphone is a marvelous tool. Students may claim that they need the calculator function in their cellphones, but they can easily store crib notes on their phones, text friends, and even access the Web. How to fight such newfangled ways of cheating? Just ask students to deposit their cellphones somewhere in the room for the duration of the exam. For exams that require calculators, you could have students exchange calculators, in case these calculators have the capacity to store crib notes.

Harder to check is cheating by looking at the exam papers of classmates. It is really unfair to penalize a student whose eyes wander around the room. Such eye movement may be completely innocent or involuntary. Such students may even be so nearsighted that they cannot actually see the answers of the students sitting next to them. How can teachers prevent this kind of cheating? The most difficult but most effective way is to have several sets of exams. In a multiple-choice exam, the answers could be coded differently (one set has A as the correct answer, the next B, the next C, and so on). Fortunately, with computers, such tedious work has been made easier for teachers.

The simplest thing a teacher can do is to ask students to cover their answer sheets with other pages of the test. This will not work, however, with students bent on broadcasting their answers to their seatmates. Walking around the room or standing behind students is supposed to discourage this kind of cheating, but who are we kidding?

An easy way to avoid this kind of cheating is to chop up an exam into parts. The teacher can collect the first part after ten minutes (or whatever time it takes to answer the questions) and the rest in irregular intervals. If the teacher makes sure that the questions are so difficult that it would take a genius to answer all of them in the time allotted, students will not have time to broadcast their answers or to look at other people’s papers. When grading the exam, all that the teacher needs to do is to reduce the denominator (instead of saying that a student got 5 out of 10 questions, say that the student got 5 out of 8). This takes into account the lack of time to answer all the questions, but allows geniuses to get extra points (getting 10 out of 8).

The most blatant way of cheating in an exam is to have someone else take it. There are infamous cases like these in the United States, written up in education journals. The example of Frank Abagnale (Leonardo DiCaprio) taking the bar in Catch Me If You Can is not farfetched. There are actually people that take exams for other people or that take exams in subjects they know little about.

To avoid this type of cheating, the teacher should check identification cards before giving out exam sheets. The teacher should not rely on signatures. Signatures are unreliable; students forge each other’s signatures. Students that seldom attend class may have perfect attendance, courtesy of classmates that sign attendance sheets for them.

I used to be naïve about students taking tests for other students. I used to (and still do) give daily quizzes in my undergraduate classes (for better monitoring of student progress). Since my quizzes consisted of mini-essays, I thought they were cheat-proof. One conscience-stricken student, however, eventually snitched: some of my brighter students would do the quizzes of their intellectually-challenged classmates. Now, I check handwriting as well as content.  (To be continued)