Introduction
Recently, I got involved in exam invigilation at the University of Palermo. Students were sitting various types of English exams at A2–B2 level. They were given a tablet, signed in with their student login details, and started their exam. They worked at their own pace and finished within the time limit for their exam type. There was no briefing on how to conduct oneself under exam conditions, there was noise, and there was cheating. Some students kept their coats on, claiming it was cold (the exam room was 27 degrees) — we're talking big puffer jackets, and you can imagine the rest. I won't dwell on the sheer absurdity of cheating in an English exam to get a degree, only to fail your first English-language job interview afterwards. That's their call.
As it happens, I relish the challenge of catching cheaters. I love preparing for anything new and spotting even the most creative offender: I want to be smarter than them. So I study body language, spot hidden alliances, catch wandering eyes and frozen stares, and decode hand signals, touched earlobes or nostrils. I reckon some of these people are genuinely capable of great things: they're using problem-solving, creative thinking and often a remarkable level of self-control — just aimed at the wrong target. Many real-life situations reward these skills far more than factual knowledge. And yet, I don't think we can treat cheating as a normal part of an exam; it's a sign of moral decay. Examiners and invigilators who treat cheating as normal and unavoidable have already taken the first big step towards discrediting their own worth as teachers. So cheats need to be identified, warned, and, if necessary, removed from the exam room.
This article isn't about why students cheat. It doesn't matter why they never found time, during their years of study, to watch YouTube videos or The Big Bang Theory in English, or why they never had a proper chat with an Erasmus student in town. Instead, I'd like to poke a little fun at how students react when caught red-handed. Here are the top five reactions of cheating exam-takers, based on real-life examples.
1. Lie and deny
Caught holding a tissue with useful English expressions scribbled on it? Tell the examiner it's a poem for your girlfriend, then suddenly pretend you desperately need to blow your nose into it. That way, the evidence disappears before it can be used against you.
Don't use old-fashioned cheat sheets any more? Your phone will do the job just as well — and you might even have the upper hand, since many invigilators are older and know their books, but aren't always comfortable with smart devices. You can always deny cheating and reach for a convenient excuse: "My smartwatch just sent me an alert — my blood sugar's dropped to dangerous levels, I need something sugary…" That last one didn't work on me: I've attended plenty of Cambridge invigilation courses, so I've grown thoroughly paranoid about electronic devices. Still, I'll admit denial is a tricky reaction to counter, requiring real critical thinking on the invigilator's part. This is exactly why seasoned invigilators carry a magic box of aspirin, sweets, clean tissues, pencils, erasers, sharpeners, pens, hand sanitiser — and a resuscitation kit (just kidding).
2. Bribe
During my very first exam session as an invigilator in Italy, one candidate offered me a tidy sum of money for the answers. I refused. He stood up, left the room, and marched straight to my boss to try to get me sacked. I went on working for the same school for another seven years. I can't — or at least, I don't want to — imagine this tactic has ever worked on an invigilator.
3. Threaten
Don't assume I'm only talking about "ordinary students" here. Not long after being promoted to Didactic Coordinator at a previous workplace, an English teacher arrived from a nearby town with her A1/A2 students and asked the school owner if she could sit in on their exam. Permission was granted, and she was given a chair to sit in during the session. Instead, she got up, began wandering around, and started feeding her students answers. Being a fairly weak A2 speaker of English herself, she found some of the questions too difficult and tried asking me — the only invigilator present — for the correct answers. I asked her to stop. As I said it in English, she didn't understand at first. When I repeated the request, she snapped back in Italian that she knew my boss. The third time, I asked her to leave the room. She turned purple, stormed out cursing in her mother tongue, and threatened to get me fired. She went straight to my boss, who was remarkably understanding with her — and, to be fair, with me too. The sad reality, though, was that from that day on, I was mysteriously given the day off whenever this teacher brought her students in to sit exams at our school. It's part of why I eventually wanted to move over to Cambridge exams, where I knew supervision and oversight were genuinely rigorous. Sadly, as you can see, bribery might not get you far, but a threat can, if exams are treated as nothing more than a revenue stream.
4. Blame
Let me tell you about a twelve-year-old boy who was thoroughly put out when I stopped him talking to his neighbour during a Young Learners exam. He tried again, then gave up. At the end of the exam, he came up to me and said, in Italian: "I didn't want to cheat, but I had no choice, since you wouldn't give me the answers!"
My bad…
5. Offend
I've lost count of the times I've been called names for warning candidates — kindly, but firmly — not to talk to each other or copy from a neighbour. I got used to it fairly quickly, perhaps because my very first experience was such a baptism of fire: Hungary, about twenty years ago. Me, a wildly enthusiastic newcomer to teaching, invigilating a German written exam — with no prior training whatsoever, incidentally. I caught a young man repeatedly asking another student for hints. He stopped each time I asked him to. With only five candidates in a small room, it was obvious to everyone what he'd been doing. He finished his exam and waited for the room to clear. Then he turned to me and said, in Hungarian: "You really must be an a**ho*** for not letting me get help. Why did it bother you so much? I could have got this certificate if you'd just pretended to be deaf…" With that, he spun round and stormed out, leaving me speechless.
So let me tell you why I stand firmly against cheats and those who help them (and I do hope that Hungarian gentleman is reading this): fairness and equal opportunity.
This isn't about one person walking away with an undeserved certificate and a few extra points on their next application. It's about everyone else — the ones who don't even try to cheat, who've prepared properly, who've respected the rules; the ones without a teacher, or any adult, willing to bend the rules for them; the ones who sit exams to genuinely prove their skills, not simply to collect another piece of paper; the ones who'll always do their best, even in their future jobs, rather than look for a shortcut to a fake result; the ones who won't steal others' ideas and pass them off as their own.
I'm against cheats because they have no place in a good, fair future. They belong to a dark and rather shameful pattern from the past. I rest my case.
PS: This article was originally published on LinkedIn on 4 February 2024.
Btw, if you are preparing for exams, you might find these lesson resources useful:
