“Surveys show that cheating in school… has soared since researchers first measured the phenomenon on a broad scale at 99 colleges in the mid-1960s.”
—Maura J. Casey, “Digging out Roots of Cheating in High School,” NY Times, Oct. 13, 2008
In high school—I went to a Waldorf high school—I cheated all the time. I gave out lots of answers, and received plenty, including in a German class that consisted of two students and an excellent teacher.
We loved Dr. Macht, his warmth, his war stories. But when it came to testing, he was terrible. He’d doze off, or leave the room. He wouldn’t notice that we’d written all the answers on the blackboard and then patted the eraser lightly over them. The board looked clean, but it was filthy with vocabulary.
I acknowledge my moral failing in cheating in his class. But Dr. Macht didn’t really care, so we didn’t care. The whole thing seems to have been a collusion between Dr. Macht and us—“I have to test you, but this won’t really do much to improve your language skills, so I’ll disengage myself, and you can do what you like.” I learned German anyway, passing a translation exam for my doctorate fifteen years later without studying. But the learning and the testing were clearly in different categories.
In middle school we taught each other cool ways to cheat. You can take a penknife, carve a bit of the paint off a pencil, and write a few helpful answers in tiny letters on the bare wood. You can tape a cheat-sheet to the back of the chair of the student in front of you. You can write on the white rubber of your converse sneakers, or on your jeans, or on your hand, although that’s the first and, often, only place a teacher will look. This was before cell phones and texting.
In high school we were just brazen—we whispered or mouthed answers across the rows, exchanged papers or tests, or just talked to each other when a teacher left the room. We prepared answer sheets in advance, then slipped them into our test booklets or piles of scrap paper.
Not everyone cheated, but most did, regardless of intelligence. I’d say more boys than girls cheated, but, then, I was a boy.
After high school, I went to a college that had a strict honor code. To this day, I remember it—we had to write it and sign it on every exam: “I pledge my honor that I have not violated the Honor Code during this examination.” I didn’t cheat in college, I wasn’t tempted to, and I never witnessed anyone else cheating. Professors placed piles of exams at the front of the room, then left. We students took the exams in the allotted time and handed them in. We could stretch out in the hall, return to our rooms, do what we liked, as long as the exam was in on time.
What was the difference? I was older in college, possibly more mature (although, living away from home, possible less), and the stakes may have been higher. But, really, the difference was in school and teacher expectations.
The consequences for cheating in high school were minimal—warning, admonishment, a lower grade. In high school, teachers—even good teachers, of which I had more than my fair share—were too self-involved or too careless. If they didn’t really care, neither did we. Why did they give tests? To appease parents or colleagues? Because it was something that teachers do? Usually, their hearts weren’t in it.
Those teachers who cared made it clear, and, for the most part, we took them seriously. “Hey. You really have to study for Mr. Madsen’s tests.” We did study, and we didn’t cheat, and we respected Mr. Madsen.
In college, it was clear, we could be expelled for cheating or plagiarizing. In college, the teachers weren’t necessarily less self-involved or careless, they didn’t necessarily believe in the educational efficacy of testing. The institution, the community of the school, however, made expectations and consequences clear, beyond any idiosyncrasies of our (sometimes very) idiosyncratic teachers. The school cared, so the individual teachers didn’t have to. The community of the school—teachers, students, administrators—took the question of cheating seriously, wrote a simple code, empanelled students and teachers to deal with violations, and secured “buy in” from everyone.
Today I work in a tiny high school of twenty students. It’s easy to police a test or exam, but I suspect some students still cheat. I tell my students about my high school experience, however, and also about my college experience. I let them know that I take cheating seriously, and that I will fail them for the course (not just for the test or the assignment) if they cheat. I also tell them that if I give them a test it will be designed fairly to allow them to demonstrate what they know, not to trip them up or to require cramming irrelevant facts. I also sit in the back of the room, behind them, so I can see them and they can’t see me. This makes illicit behavior easier to spot.
Writing a “real” test, one that fairly assesses knowledge and ability and that makes cheating difficult, is a chore, but it’s a worthwhile chore. If the answers aren’t things that can be whispered between students, or copied onto a crib sheet, students will find it harder to cheat, even if they want to. If they know that their teachers respect them and their mutual educational work, they’ll be less prone to cheating. If they know that teachers and school take cheating seriously, too, they’ll be less willing to risk the consequences.
The Internet has made it easier to cheat on papers—copying and pasting replace thinking and writing—but it’s also made it easy to catch cheaters. A few years ago, one of my students wrote a biography of Che Guevara. I suspected that the work wasn’t the student’s own. I chose five words from his paper that seemed like words he might not use, typed them into Google, and was directed instantly to the obscure paper, posted to the web, from which he had copied. It took me about fifteen seconds. I tell my current students this story, too.
I don’t know for certain that my students don’t cheat on tests, but I’m pretty sure they’re better behaved than I was at their age. Part of my teaching today is to avoid the mistakes my own teachers and I made a long time ago.
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