Cheating at examinations

The report earlier this month that several educators in the US State of Atlanta have been handed heavy prison sentences on racketeering charges linked to a widespread cheating racket at schools’ tests serves as a timely reminder that the region faces its own challenges with cheating at examinations, ranging from individual student concealment of answers to questions set for routine end-of-term/year examinations to more elaborate scams – including the advance acquisition of examination papers – that target the CXC examination.

A few things about the Atlanta affair are worth mentioning here. One report describes the occurrence as “one of America’s largest cheating scandals of its kind.” The report states that the education officials caught in the racket “include teachers, a principal and other administrators” and that they went about “falsifying test results to collect bonuses or to keep their jobs in the 50,000-student Atlanta public school system.” The racket, we also learnt, went as far back as 2005 when it had been found that “educators fed answers to students or erased and changed answers on tests after they were turned in.” Other reports suggest that the Atlanta scandal is not unique, that over time there have been reports of test-cheating at other public schools across the US where test scores are linked to school funding, staff bonuses and threats to close schools that perform poorly. On the whole the Atlanta incidents and their precedents are deeply unpalatable affairs, criminal occurrences that raise searching questions about some American teachers and teaching administrators. Little wonder that the accused officials were treated like common criminals, paraded in the court in handcuffs.

It is difficult to pronounce with any degree of certainty on the extent to which cheating at examinations goes on in the Caribbean. We are aware, however, that there have been pronouncements on the issue from the Caribbean Examinations Council including cases a few years ago (in Trinidad and Tobago) where cheating charges against students had reached the courts. We recall too the rather blunt assertion by a CXC official two years ago about teacher complicity in cheating by the submission of fraudulent School-Based Assessment (SBA) sample documents on their schools’ behalf. The official made reference to “a major case three years ago” when, in the course of re-marking samples, “it was realized that the work was from a previous syllabus. “When the sample was being analyzed, the cover of one submitted SBA was slitted with a knife and peeled back. It had a totally different cover, different name, different year, different candidate, different everything. It turned out the teacher never did SBAs with the class. She manufactured SBAs and told the candidates, ‘Don’t worry, you don’t have to do SBAs. I will fix it for you’, and they agreed.” Needless to say, this kind of occurrence has raised pertinent questions across the region about the veracity of the SBA as a proficiency measuring tool.

This newspaper’s recent conversations with local teachers and lecturers at both the University of Guyana and the Cyril Potter College of Education suggests that cheating at examinations is “quite routine” both within those institutions and across the education system as a whole. We were told that methods of cheating can range from the commonplace practice of plagiarism to that of   securing the illegal assistance of ‘an outside source’ to secure answers to examination questions.

Cheating has also manifested itself in common breaking and entering crimes in which cases the thieves steal examination papers for monetary gain rather than for their academic value. Cheating has evolved with technology and these days the advent of the cellular phone and the internet offer ways of cheating that were unheard of as recent as a decade or so ago. It is no secret that today’s students, having been brought up in the age of the new technology are finding newer though not always more desirable ways of using that technology.

What is unquestionably the most disturbing feature of cheating at examinations is that – as the Atlanta occurrences clearly indicate – cheating is not simply (as might often be felt) a practice by students seeking to secure an illegal advantage; it has become – in the United States and here is the Caribbean as well – a ‘for-profit’ pursuit in which functionaries responsible for professional curriculum delivery are involved. The prevalence of the practice reflects (as a retired Head Teacher has told this newspaper) an “undervaluing of the significance of academic achievement” to a point where “what matters is certification rather than qualification.” Here in Guyana there are professional educators who contend that rather than being seen as an earned achievement, certification, these days, has come to be seen, increasingly, as ‘a piece of paper’ that serves as a means to an end.

The pronouncements that have been made about cases of cheating at examinations by the Caribbean Examinations Council do not add up to a definitive evaluation of the scale of the problem nor does the suggestion that the practice is ‘pretty commonplace’ help determine how widespread it is. What is disturbing, however, is that while we wait for answers to questions regarding the pervasiveness of cheating at examinations we may well be doing irreparable damage to the integrity of our valued education system.