Once a cheater…
Recently, I got involved in exam invigilation at the University of Palermo. Students were sitting different types of exams in English at A2-B2 levels. They were given a tablet, signed in with their student login details and started their exam. They followed their own pace, finished within their time limit depending on their exam type, there was no introduction into how to conduct oneself under exam conditions, there was noise and there was cheating. Some students kept on their coats saying that it was cold (there were 27 degrees in the exam room), we are talking about big puffer jackets and you can imagine the rest. I don’t want to talk about the insane nature of cheating in an English exam in order to get a degree and then fail in their first English-led job interview. It’s their call.
In fact, I accept the challenge to hunt cheaters down. I’m eager to prepare for anything new and notice even the most creative cheater: I want to be smarter than them. So, I study body language, detect hidden friendships, catch wandering eyes and frozen stares, decode hand signals, touched earlobes or nostrils. I reckon that some of these people are actually capable of doing something great in their lives, they are using problem solving, creative thinking and often a high level of self-control – instead of learning. Many life situations benefit more of these skills than factual knowledge. Yet, I think that we cannot accept cheating as a normal phenomenon in an exam, but as a sign of moral decadency. Examiners and invigilators considering cheating as normal and unavoidable have already taken the first big leap towards discrediting their own worth and value as teachers. So, cheaters need to be identified, warned and if necessary expelled from the examination room.
In this article, I don’t want to discuss why students cheat. It doesn’t matter why they haven’t found time in their study years to watch YouTube videos or The Big Bang Theory in English or why they have never had a good chat with an Erasmus student in town in English. Here, I’d like to mock how students react when they get caught red-handed. Here are the top five reactions of cheating exam-takers – based on real-life examples:
1. Lie & deny
You got spotted holding a tissue in your hand with useful English expressions scribbled on it? Tell the examiner that it’s a poem for your girlfriend, but then pretend that you urgently need the tissue and blow your nose into it. This way, the counterpart cannot use the evidence against you.
You don’t use old-fashioned cheat-sheets any more? Your digital device will do it. You might even be at advantage, because many invigilators are mature adults, they know books, but might not be comfortable with a smart device. You can always deny cheating and name some useful reasons: My i-watch just sent me a message that my blood sugar dropped to dangerous levels, I need candy… This later excuse did not work on me: I have attended many courses about invigilation of Cambridge exams, so I’d grown to be paranoid about electronic devices. However, I reckon denial is a tricky reaction, which needs a great deal of critical thinking to fight. This is why good old invigilators have a magic box with aspirins, candies, clean tissues, pencils, erasers, sharpeners, pens, hand sanitiser and a reanimation kit (just kidding).
2. Bribe
In my very first exam session as an invigilator in Italy, one of the candidates offered me a nice sum of money if I gave him the answers to the questions. I refused. He stood up and left the room. He headed straight to my boss to get me fired. I worked for the same school for another 7 years. I can’t or at least I don’t want to imagine that this has ever worked with an invigilator.
3. Threaten
Well, don’t think that I am only talking about ‘common students’. Not long after being promoted to Didactic Coordinator at one of my previous work places, an English teacher arrived from a nearby town with her A1/A2 students and asked the school owner to be present while her students sat their exam. She was given permission and was assigned a chair to sit on during the examination. However, she stood up and started walking around and giving answers to her students. Since she was a low A2 English speaker herself, she found some of the questions too difficult and tried to ask me, the only invigilator, for the correct answers. I asked her to stop what she was doing. Since I did it in English, she didn’t understand it at first. The second time when I repeated my request she answered me back in Italian, saying that she knew my boss. The third time, I asked her to leave the room. She turned purple and left the room cursing in her mother tongue and threatening me to get me fired. She went straight to my boss, who showed himself very understanding with her and later also with me. The sad reality was, though, that from that day on, I got a day-off every time, when this teacher came with her students to sit exams at our school. This was the reason why I wanted to switch to Cambridge exams, where I knew supervision and inspection were real. As you can see, bribes might not work, but a threat might make its way, if exams are nothing more than a simple way of making money.
4. Blame
Let me move on to telling you a story about a 12-year old boy, who was really upset when I stopped him from talking to his neighbour during a Young Learner exam. He tried one more time, then gave up. At the end of the exam, he approached me saying in Italian: I didn’t want to cheat but I had no other choice since you were not willing to give me the answers!
My bad…
5. Offend
On countless occasions, I was called names when warning candidates – in a nice voice, but firmly – not to talk to each other or copy from a peer. I got pretty quickly used to it. Maybe because my first experience was really harsh: Hungary, about 20 years ago. Me, a super-enthusiastic newbie in the teaching world, invigilating a German written test – without any prep training, by the way. I caught a young gentleman who repeatedly asked another student for some suggestions. He stopped every time I asked him to do so. Also, because there were only 5 candidates in a small room, it was obvious to everyone what he was doing. He finished his exam and waited for everyone to leave the room. 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 hurt you? I could have gotten this certificate if you had pretended to be deaf… With these last words, he turned around and raced out of the room, leaving me speechless.
So, let me tell you why I am firmly against cheaters and their helpers (and I hope that Hungarian gentleman is reading my words): Fairness and equal opportunities.
It’s not about someone getting an undeserved certificate and points in the next public tender. It’s about the ones who don’t even try to cheat. Who have prepared, who have respected the rules. The ones who do not have their teacher or any teacher with loose morals around them. The ones who are there to prove their skills and not just to get another piece of paper. The ones who will do their best even in their jobs and won’t find an easy way to get to a fake result. Who won’t steal ideas from the others and pretend to be more than they really are.
I am against cheaters, because they have no space in a good and fair future. They are part of a dark and despicable past pattern. I rest my case.
PS: This article was originally published on Linkedin on 4th February 2024. Here is the original post.
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