MORE than 4,000 students were caught cheating at A-level and GCSE exams last year. Proof indeed of the dumbing down of education, that so many should try and get caught.
The percentage success rate in my day was far higher, I’m sure. It is bad enough standards seemingly in all subjects should be dropping – the latest example is a teacher who gave his class of 10-years-olds a science GCSE paper to do and a third of them passed, even though they had not yet studied any science - but that the system, despite all its billions, is not producing pupils who can cheat and get away with it is condemnation of the system indeed.
Where is the UK in these Euro league tables they keep trotting out at such times? Bottom I shouldn’t wonder. I bet there are sharper cheats in France. Oh, the shame!
So, how were they caught cheating? Well, it seems top of the list of banned items smuggled into exams were mobile phones.
How were they expecting to get away with that, for heaven’s sake? Presumably, not by phoning a friend and asking for the answer. Even the doziest of invigilators would detect a conversation going on somewhere in the room. Wouldn’t they?
Texting is the method of choice, and pretty damn pathetic it strikes me.
I assume whoever oversees these exams is still positioned centrally at the front in order to cast a baleful eye over proceedings, and occasionally patrols the room specifically to catch cheats and to make sure no-one has actually died.
In which case students are unlikely to escape with even the shortest and most furious bout of thumb-blurring message coding.
“Wotz pythag thrm?�
They also have the reply to cater for.
Calculators and dictionaries were also popular and, I have to say, depressingly predictable when, given today’s fashions, they could probably get away with the Archimedes principle tattoed across on their forearm.
Where is the imagination in bringing such tools?
I am sure they were not as easily concealed as the list of mathematical theorems on your shirtcuff, or even key words on paper rolled up inside a pen top or cleverly listed within a new cartridge box. Dates on toilet paper you could eat in an emergency was better still.
If they weren’t wise to those ruses then - and they probably were - they will be now, which is why cheats have to go to greater extremes than the obvious solution, do the work, learn the subject.
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