I’ll be cheating you, in all the tests that I’ll be taking,
I’ve become adept at making crib notes too.
In my small watch case some verbs in French I’ll place,
the Gettysburg Address, a Shakespeare play and more I guess.
I’ll hire planes to skywrite notes outside my window too . . .
I’ll be looking at the sky and I’ll be cheating you.
With apologies to Sigmund Romberg’s musical, “The Student Prince,” Mad Magazine created a spoof on one of the Songs, “I’ll Be Seeing You.”
Appropriately, the satire, which may have appeared 40 years ago, well describes some of the ingenious methods students have employed in order to pass the test.
Cheating is a serious problem on campuses, though some of the techniques people employ are–well–very clever. And though some of the teachers interviewed for this column have been amused by students’ creativity, they insist cheating is wrong. Is it pure coincidence that “teach” and “cheat” contain the same letters?
This column is not designed to profile students as a Society of Cheaters; rather, a lot of tentative, ambiguous, flabby teaching often has created a situation in which students don’t really know when they’ve plagiarized, for example.
A high-tech method of cheating occurred last November, at New Mexico State University. A professor would post answers outside of the exam room so students upon leaving could compare their answers. An invention called text messaging came about, in which friends stationed outside the door tapped in the correct answers for their friends in the classroom.
The professor trapped a slew of students the next time, as she placed incorrect answers in the hall.
All of us are familiar with the standard “cheat sheet,” a piece of paper with the type so compressed that it virtually goes unnoticed.
Kirk Ludi, a computer teacher at West Las Vegas High School, said that in the past, students have stashed answers in the headband of their baseball caps, or inside a pair of sunglasses, which they casually place on the desk. Ludi says that, wisely, those items are not allowed in school.
Students try to store a crib sheet in the cap of their pen. One girl, suffering from a cold, had written all her answers on a Kleenex, and in a Gesundheit moment, blew her entire effort.
Caroline Lopez, a history teacher at West Las Vegas Middle School, says she’s happy that in her classes cheating is rare. “You can always tell who’s on the verge of cheating–they just look guilty,” she said.
However, students in Lopez’s class often allow their work to be seen by others. Lopez said she suspects there is some bullying on the part of students allowed to look at others’ papers.
A student in the sixties once accepted $5 from a marginal male student for the right to sit next to her and look at her paper during the final. When exam day came, the enterprising student wrote all the answers very small.
Ray Gallegos, whose day job is teaching science at Memorial Middle School, and who teaches occasional courses elsewhere, said students need to be watched carefully. “In one of my classes, students would write the essay part ahead of time and try to slip it in during the exam,” Gallegos said. Now, in one class, he carries a rubber stamp. “Those who try to turn work in without the stamp know I won’t accept it.”
Robert Aragon, a WLVHS math teacher, tries to make it impossible for students to cheat. For example, if it’s a large class, Aragon will prepare three versions of the test, numbered differently. Inasmuch as he usually prepares the exams the night before, the opportunity to cheat is scant. Says Aragon, “It’s a shame when kids are caught cheating. Sometimes they’re not sure of themselves and accept answer that are wrong. Most of the time, the kid had the right answer in the first place.”
Elsewhere, “Kids develop a twitching neck. That gives them excuse to scratch, distract, lean over and cop a glance at someone else’s paper,” said 20-year Robertson English teacher Florence Hernandez.
Many of Hernandez’s students are college-bound, a factor that appears to reduce the need or desire to cheat. Like Lopez and Aragon, she tries to prevent the possibility of cheating.
A common practice for some homework and worksheets is having students exchange and grade one another’s work. “Some students just won’t mark their friends’ papers wrong,” she said, “or they even try to put in the right answers, but it becomes obvious when we compare handwriting and ink color.”
Ruth Cresto, a recently retired science teacher at MMS, said in 26 years of teaching, she became aware that students would write answers on their hands and legs. “I could often spot the guilty ones by how often they kept lifting their pants legs,” Cresto said. Instances of cheating she would deal with personally, and she’s happy to say, “I never had a repeat offender.”
The consensus seems to be that studying isn’t that difficult, and students expend much energy dodging the work and contriving creative ways of getting the answers.