cheating...

I must preface this by saying that the students at my school have been the best part of my PC experience. That being said, I am absolutely appalled by the amount and variety of cheating that takes place during semester exams. It’s an absolute relief that testing is over. I know this isn’t the first time I’ve mentioned cheating in the schools, and it most likely will not be the last, but each day I proctored exams I left completely dumbfounded and with a spinning head. There was always this horrible feeling in my gut, trying to wrap my head around why something so taboo in American schools is so routine here. Part of it’s cultural, but teachers and students both admit that it’s immoral. The vice principal asked me for the ‘solution to the cheating problem’ and all I could think of was “have some sort of punishment for cheating” or “have the teachers actually monitor the exams instead of playing on their laptops and standing outside their rooms chatting” or simply “try to motivate the students to take pride in doing their own work.”

Here’s a brief description of the testing set-up:
• Each room has a combination of students from different grades, who alternate seats in order to hinder cheating (it does absolutely nothing to deter them from doing so)
• Between 2-3 subjects tested each day
• Each test is 90 minutes, separated by a 15 minute break
• There are 30 multiple choice questions and 5 short answer/essay questions
• The students are handed an answer sheet similar to a scantron, and a separate question sheet
• One teacher for every 35 students

At first I thought the students cheated because the exams were too difficult, that maybe there were just too many subjects. I even felt sorry for them to an extent. But after several casual inquiries I found out it’s because a majority of the students simply just don’t study. So my new mission for this upcoming semester is figuring out how to motivate students to study on their own and ‘take pride in doing their own work’- not because a teacher will punish them if they don’t, but because they should get some type of gratification from accomplishing something based on their own hard work. A good life lesson.

I will now end this note with a list of the Top 20 ways (in no particular order) I caught students cheating in just the 3 days that I proctored exams, each of varying degrees of creativity and covertness. And none of which seemed punishable.

1. Directly asking the person next to him/her for the answer
2. Or the person behind him/her
3. Or in front of him/her
4. Or across the room
5. Getting the answer keys from a parent who is a teacher at the school
6. Writing answers on one’s shoe
7. Writing the answers on one’s veil/jilbab
8. Writing the answers on a compact mirror, then constantly checking one’s appearance in said mirror during the exam
9. Writing the answers on the desk the day before the exam
10. Writing all the answers on the back of the test and sliding it over so one’s neighbor can see the list
11. Writing answers on erasers, whiteout, pencil sharpeners, etc, then letting one’s friend borrow the aforementioned object(s)
12. Sliding one’s answer sheet over so one’s neighbor can read it more easily
13. Holding the test in front of one’s face (pretending to read it intently) in order to cover one’s mouth when sharing answers
14. Texting/using cell phones
15. Directly exchanging question sheets with the answers circled
16. Exchanging answer sheets so another student can write the essay answer
17. Using one’s hands to show the number of the question and letter of the answer
18. Having one’s workbook open on the desk
19. Having a friend who’s already finished the exam walk by outside and share answers through the back windows
20. Filling out an answer sheet before the test and switching it with the blank one given by the teacher