SEPTEMBER 2 — Benjamin Franklin famously said that nothing in life is certain except death and taxes.
As someone working in the education sector for more than two decades, I can say (for certain) that Franklin’s list should include students cheating during exams.
In the average education institution, every end-of-semester is the time when lecturers are required to be invigilators for closed-book examinations (see note 1) which usually last between 1.5 hours to 3 hours.
For some lecturers, these hours can be the most boring periods of the year, a monotony broken only by the occasional cheater being caught.
Studying, practising, learning, etc. — all these time-tested habits to excel in academia are apparently too much of a hassle (or, maybe in some cases, an impossibility?) for a select group of students; when combined with an abject refusal to accept failure or low scores, it can lead to desperation which, alas, produces cheating.
The most common method today seems to be the same one used since time immemorial: smuggling notes into the exam hall.
Pockets, sleeves, pencil boxes, shoes, socks, even tudungs — anything which can hold a tiny piece of note paper is a potential cheating apparatus.
Drama can ensure when some invigilators catch students referring to hidden notes but, when confronted, the potential culprit refuses to fess up and surrender the material.
In such cases, accusations (by the cheating student) of harassment are not uncommon. In very few cases, even attempted bribery (“I can pay you”) occurs.
Some students, however, are apparently too lazy to write their hard-to-recall textbook bullet points in nano-stationery, so what do they do? They write into their phones and try to hide said devices.
There was the time a student was asked to stand up because the invigilator suspected he had a phone. The student insisted he didn’t. The back-and-forth ensued a few minutes until, lo and behold, the student’s pants lit up because his phone (which was stuffed inside his underwear) rang.
PSA: When attempting to cheat, maybe turn off both sound and light on the phone?
Then there are the garden-variety illicit communiques during the exam. We can’t blame any examination centre for seating two friends close together but sometimes this is what happens.
And, well, often whispers and “sign language” may arise. In such cases invigilators need to navigate the difficult terrain filled with “I didn’t say anything, Sir”, “I was only asking if the question paper had two sides” and what-not.
Slightly more difficult is how to prevent students from casually chit-chatting while they’re lining up to go to the toilet.
And speaking of the loo, I’m not aware of anything a university or college can do (short of some high-tech Star Wars-like body scanner) if a student hides notes inside his/her undies only to refer to them in the toilet cubicle. Perhaps that’s the only invigilator-proof examination-cheating scheme.
I suspect hiding notes in one’s undergarments is a more effective manner than the latest approach I saw this year: Wearing smart glasses.
Thanks to Google and Meta, some students can wear their Note App viewing devices on their heads (or maybe in their eyes? via smart contact lenses?) but, for now, it’s still somewhat easy to tell from the slightly high-tech-ish look these spectacles exude.
In the future, who knows; it may be impossible to “see” that a student is wearing an XReal or Echo Frame.
We can only hope by this time some kind of technology in exam-cheating detection has been invented (but I’m not optimistic).
Until that happens, have some sympathy for us (very) human invigilators tasked to catch students getting the kind of help they aren’t allowed to have.
Note 1: I’ve written before about the growing importance of open book examinations as a way of dealing with the many issues associated with closed-book exams. Still, like it or not, the latter isn’t going away very soon so the forms of cheating discussed in this article will inevitably continue.
* This is the personal opinion of the columnist.
