The Cheating News roundup from Caveon this week includes a rather surprising example of a test administration with no cheating observed:
The Education and Training Ministry [of Vietnam] took measures to prevent cheating among the 750,000 twelfth graders who began taking their three-day final exams on Wednesday.
The ministry set up four teams to supervise exam preparations in 12 provinces and cities, six teams to supervise the exam itself and three teams to oversee grading in certain places.
Any supervisors caught violating exam regulations would be seriously punished, said Le Thi Thanh Xuan, deputy chief inspector on education of the ministry.
Oookay, so maybe it's not surprising that no one cheated. Deputy chief inspector Le Thi Thanh Xuan doesn't sound like he's joking around. Gee, why can't he be more relaxed about this whole cheating phenomenon? You know, like the enlightened professors in American who gladly admit that their students are "no saints"?
When Bill was unsure of the answer to a question in a finance exam last year, he sent a text message on his cell phone to a friend who was also taking the test. The friend sent him the correct answer. When Lisa wasn't sure she could remember mathematical formulas for an accounting exam, she stored them in a calculator with its own memory, and then used them to help complete the test.
Bill, 21, and Lisa, 22, both of whom asked that their real names not be used, study business at DePaul University, which has seen a tenfold increase in reported cases of cheating in the past five years.
"We like to think our students are more committed than most, but they are not saints, either,'' said Charles Strain, the school's associate vice president for academic affairs.
Oh, hey, as long as they're committed, then it's okay, right? I mean, God forbid you should try to take Bill's cell phone away from him during an exam, or insist that would-be accountants like Lisa actually memorize formulas. God forbid you should expect students to be smart enough to understand that cheating is still cheating when you use new technology:
Cheating these days comes with an added twist -- new technology, which in some cases makes it so easy that students don't even believe what they are doing is wrong. From cutting and pasting text from a Web site into a term paper to using cell phones or personal data assistants equipped with wireless Internet access to search for answers while taking a test, technology is becoming a partner in dishonesty.
Emphasis mine, because I'm not buyin' it. Nope, no sale here. You cannot convince me that just because a student can cut and paste off the Internet, as opposed to out of an encyclopedia, that student doesn't realize that it's cheating. You cannot convince me that a student, who knows that asking their friend for answers during an exam is wrong, somehow will believe that it isn't wrong if they use a cell phone to do so.
I call horse puckey on this one. The powers that be have merely pulled the wool over their own eyes, and allowed themselves to believe that students are somehow confused by all this new technology, when the rest of us all realize that students are becoming experts at using these new gadgets to cheat.
And I think Le Thi Thanh Xuan would agree with us.
But back to the poor, confused American students:
And because of increased competition to get into top colleges and graduate schools, students say they are under more pressure than ever to get good grades, leading them to cheat more.
I think I accidentally stepped on, and crushed, the world's smallest violin this morning, so the sad, sad song to accompany this tale of dishonest, over-competitive woe will have to wait until I locate the world's smallest banjo. Then you can all join me in a moving bluegrass song entitled, "I Got Them Non-Ivy-League Blues."
And speaking of bluegrass, here's one Kentuckian who isn't buying the notion that we have to give in and allow these poor, confused, pressured students to cheat whenever they want:
The Newsweek headline says resume lies are on the rise, and it details harrowing stories about the huge increase in "fibbing" on resumes. The magazine cited a-Korn/Ferry online survey that said 44.7 percent of respondents think resume fraud among executives is increasing.
On April 29, Charles Gibson hosted an hourlong ABC special that explored cheating. The program cited a 2002 survey of 12,000 high school students by the Josephson Institute of Ethics that revealed 74 percent cheated on an exam at least once in the past year...
Some people can say they never took anything from the office or winked when they benefited from a clerk's error, but most of us have some act of cheating in our past for which we feel guilty. But there's the difference. Many people cheating now don't feel guilty. Worse, some people seem to think the real dolts are those who don't cheat!
As we mature, most of us come to realize that cheating is lying, and liars cannot be trusted. Families, workplaces and commerce do not work well when people flout the rules...I think there are two [reasons for this]...
One, winning has become the only thing. We pressure our kids to get the best grades so they can go to the best schools, then we act shocked when they cheat on a test. We worship at the altar of credentials, then we are incredulous that someone would make up impressive facts for their resume. We seldom use integrity and character as benchmarks. Instead, we get hung up on credentials and high test scores.
The second reason is uglier. Too few people ever say cheating is wrong. At work, across the back fence and at family reunions, we hear tales of cheating all the time...We say nothing. Our silence is approval.
That means the cheaters win and get rewarded. That has to change. Perhaps we don't have the wherewithal to turn people in to the authorities, but each of us should be able to find the courage to tell cheaters we disapprove of their behavior...
I think we should find the wherewithal to do at least that much. If not, we really can't say much about the students for whom high grades without subject mastery are the ultimate goals.
Posted by kswygert at July 30, 2004 09:30 AM