High-tech forms of cheating get all of the press, but students in Britain still seem to prefer the low-tech variety: writing the answers on arms and other body parts.
The Sun, a British newspaper, filed a Freedom of Information request to learn the most popular forms of cheating, and writing on the skin was No. 1 — at least among the 160 students who were caught. Among the other popular forms of cheating: buying essays off the Internet, stealing information, faking illness, hiding notes in the bathroom or in pencil cases or reference books, plagiarizing from the Web, having a stand-in take the exam, pretending that bereavement affected performance, and using a mobile phone.
The Telegraph, another British newspaper, reported that a poll of 1,000 students at the University of Cambridge found that nearly one in two admitted having cheated.
The Chronicle has written about essay mills, high-tech cheating, and even a Russian museum exhibit on cheating, but we continue to be amazed by the variety of ways that students cheat. How do your students cheat?What’s the most outrageous form of college cheating you’ve ever seen? Drop us a note at tweed@chronicle.com, with “cheating” in the subject line.
—Don Troop
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One Response to Armed With the Answers
brucedavis - January 21, 2010 at 9:56 am
No surprises. One of these centuries we in the learning profession will realize that memory-based, short-time tests aren’t appropriate learning assessments. Employers don’t hire people for their memories, their command of factoids, or for their ability to jam info in their head for a few hours; they typically want good thinkers, those who can solve problems and make decisions–attributes not assessed in the high-pressure class tests. Yeah, those kind of tests are easier than more realistic and authentic assessments and they are part of how we were taught, but are those good enough for today? Alas, we’re still stuck with 19th century pedagogy and with thinking this is the only way to evaluate learning. The future of learning should have been yesterday.