The Cheating Game
'Everyone's doing it,' from grade school to graduate school
The same standardized exams that drive students to do whatever it takes to gain an edge also push teachers--whose job security or salary can be linked to student performance--to do the unthinkable. This summer, for example, the Houston Independent School District demanded the resignations of a principal and three teachers after a nine-month probe turned up evidence of instructors giving oral prompting during the state achievement test and then using answer keys to correct students' responses, among other offenses.
Most cheaters don't get caught. In fact, perhaps the major reason students cheat is that they get away with it, time and time again. Numerous studies say that students almost never squeal on a classmate who cheats. And most instructors just don't want to play cop. "I'm not here to prevent students from cheating," says Robert Corless, an applied mathematics professor at the University of Western Ontario who eliminated take-home exams a few years ago after he caught students collaborating on them. "I'm here to help the genuine learners catch fire." He'll close off the easy routes, but that's about it. "Spending my time listening to appeals or accusations of cheating is not my idea of spending it well."
Procedures are the least of the hassles encountered by those who pursue cheating cases. It can be complicated, time consuming, futile, and--in the worst-case scenario--litigious. Science teacher McCandless says he feared a lawsuit when one mother berated him for damaging her daughter's self-esteem; she felt he should have waited until after a test to chastise the girl for cheating. And although legal action is rare, teachers at both the K-12 and higher-education levels say it makes them wary about pursuing cheaters. John Hill, a professor of law at St. Thomas University in Florida, actually landed in court. His house was egged and his students hissed at him. And all because he charged a student whose brilliant report for a course on legal ethics was practically identical to a Stanford Law Review article. (She contends she mistakenly turned in an early draft.) The university honor society narrowly convicted her and meted out a token punishment. Now graduated, she is suing Hill and the university for "loss of ability to obtain a job as an attorney," among other complaints.
IT'S EARLY ON NOVEMBER 6, SAT DAY, AND RAY Nicosia is on the prowl. The director of test security for the Educational Testing Service, Nicosia is making the rounds at a high school test center that has had a string of recent security problems, to guarantee things go smoothly this time--or take steps to shut the site down. He cruises the corridors, a vision of calm amid the throngs of edgy students, and runs through a mental checklist: He verifies that test booklets are kept in a secure storage area, far away from the probing eyes--and fingers--of students, until the very last minute. He glances in classrooms, making sure that proctors follow the rules, checking and double-checking valid forms of identification, randomly assigning students to desks at least 4 feet apart, filling out a seating chart (a permanent record of who sat next to whom), and then strolling about the room during the exam, searching out wandering eyes and other suspicious activity.
advertisement
