A Rockstar public service message: Cheating baaad. (Skates goooood).
“19-year-old student arrested over alleged exam cheating via cell phone”
Shock! Horror! This is news? Ok maybe the cell phone is news?
The push to perform has been so strong and for pretty long. Kids get rewarded for being top students, but how often are they rewarded as well for being top people? The incentives to cheat are so strong – and then when they grow into dodgy bankers, lawyers and what-not people are surprised?
In my second university year, my beloved maternal grandmother died. It was as close to being an emotional wreck as I ever got. She’d been one of my – our role models. My mother and I were inconsolable. I then flunked an exam for the first time in my life.
Flunk one kiss Honors goodbye unless say, you get an A in every other exam paper – I was in a course in a Singapore unuiversity back then where the average student had scored at least 3As in the Cambridge ‘A’ levels to get in. (You were lucky to get a spot if you “only” had 2As and a B. And you would probably not want to publicize the fact.)
I wrote to the appeals board, hoping for the opportunity to re-sit the paper without the albatross of a failed paper hanging over all my other grades in the consideration for Honors, and surprise, surprise, got nowhere.
(My Singaporean coursemates told me that was gonna happen – lotsa people were appealing Cs simply because they wanted As, so unless you had some medical reason backed by a hospital admission or something, can fergeddit. Damn. I should have gotten myself checked into a hospital with a prescription for Prozac or whatever would be accepted by the appeals board. What could possibly motivate me to lie that I needed meds?)
Speaking of Cs. Here’s how I got this C in secondary school. A black belt, grade 8, debating and Interact Club presidency took me out of class often enough that I would have to get the notes from a classmate on occasion. The “friend” I asked to fill me in on what chapters were covered in a test gave me the wrong ones.
Then there was the private piano teacher who called my mother to insist I sit for a lower grade than the one I was skipping a year for, because a distinction in the lower grade was almost guaranteed, thereby boosting her own track record for distinctions at the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music exams (we went Yamaha all the way after that).
Sometimes these things just become a habit: I remember a simple ethics test as one of the new hires going for a bank’s orientation program. It wasn’t tough, without paying too much attention my companion and I each had maybe 2 wrong answers. We only needed to get more right than wrong answers and had comfortably scored As – but then the test papers got left on the table and my companion took the opportunity to amend his test score to 100%.
(Btw, he was a one-time “management trainee” at a certain major bank. That’s code for he probably graduated with first class honors. I didn’t even get honors. The guys who pick MTs for the program would bin my application. So I applied for and after 2 months of interviewing got the job as an “experienced hire” instead. It paid about 60% better, Praise the Lord.)
My companion expressed surprise I didn’t change my test answers.
Did anyone at all find it funny this was a bank’s ethics test?
Levitt & Dubner’s Freakonomics narrates how President Bush’s 2002 No Child Left Behind which mandated high-stakes testing of students increased the incentives of teachers to help students cheat, rather than necessarily increased the incentives of students to study, like its advocates hoped it would.
According to the book, California high-stakes testing at one point introduced bonuses of USD 25,000 for teachers who produced big test-score gains. Have a class/ school that does badly, on the other hand, and raises/ promotions or federal funding could be withheld.
Somehow I have this idea it wasn’t so much the carrots but the sticks that would motivate these teachers to cheat. Even some of the public schools in Malaysia my mother taught in are no walk in the park – and you don’t have metal detectors like some of the public schools in the States. It would be hard enough motivating some of these people to go to school every day with kids that might be positively feral – and now they have to produce results based on some multiple choice test, or risk losing federal funding to boot
Then there’s the parents in Hong Kong who fake the school reports their kids get when they apply for some of the top schools. Even when their kids weren’t doing that badly to begin with. What I’d really like to know is what these parents tell their kids when they’re doing that.
I remember a dad I knew through work, whose daughter had recently scored a first from Oxford (in Law, I think). He told me his wife emailed her some article about the merits of erm, more “honorable” behavior, and the daughter replied, “I have no morals. Only goals.”
So here I go again about “ultra-competitiveness.” I don’t think systems that promote this necessarily create better students. But I believe they can make worse people. And they’re just starting younger and younger these days.
It’s like a roundabout way of rewarding “less-than-noble-behavior.” (And yes, I use the same argument for stuff like Enron. As long as it pays better to be a crook than a regulator, you will get first class crooks and second class regulators.)
Then opponents of high-stakes testing raised that test orientation might be to the exclusion of other important lessons. I’d like to think they were also talking about the ones that teach you to be a person. The friends I kept, whom I treasure – none of them were the ones I hung out with when I was in some of those top classes or courses. And none of em are doing too shabbily in life and career either.
Who would want a “friend” who gave you the wrong chapters to study anyway.
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gp7W6wV-obs]
