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Grade “A” Cheating
Video Credit: Andrew Wong (AWSoyProductions)
Photo Credit: Amanda Reth
Johnathon Pablo, Staff Writer
November 30, 2011
Filed under Student Life
You finish your test early and decide to take a glance around the room. You observe that students are in a panic. They’re savoring every opportune second to glance at another person’s test. They are cheating. Cheating happens everyday at school. Both teachers and students are aware of it’s occurrence.
“Almost everyone does it, at least half of my classroom is cheating everyday,” senior Austin Kenerly said. “ I rarely see anyone ever get caught.”
History teacher Niles Carlin writes up 5 to 6 students a year for cheating on tests.
“It may seem like I catch very few students, but those that I do catch are cases I have full evidence of them cheating,” Carlin said. “I can’t write someone up unless I’m 100% positive they were cheating, but if I suspect cheating, I will give some sort of verbal warning to the class as a whole.”
Carlin discourages his students from cheating with his famous quote, “fail with integrity,” but even then kids still attempt to cheat in his classroom.
“I know kids are cheating when they are stretching every five seconds or when thieir coughing seems unrealistic, it’s fairly obvious,” Carlin said. “I’ll usually give them some sort of warning until I take their tests and give them a failing grade and referral.”
Science teacher John Cardoso also deals with cheating everyday.
“On every test, I know that there’s at least one person who is attempting to cheat, I try to keep a close watch on the class to keep the cheating at a minimal level.” Cardoso said. “I can only see so much.”
Cardoso does not only deal with cheating on tests, he also catches people cheating on homework.
“I’ve had kids who would take some one’s entire homework packet, tear off the corner of all the pages to hide the name of the student who did it and write their own name on the first page,” Cardoso said. “People should quit wasting energy on cheating when they could just study and actually know the material anyway.”
Freshman Natalie Newton has spotted more strategic approaches to cheating during tests.
“I’ve seen people signal one another by tapping their pencils on their desk, if the answer was A they would tap once, if it was for B they would tap twice, and so on,” Newton said. “None of the kids were caught.”
However, with all “good” strategies, come bad ones. Freshman Jenna Pablo has seen students “yell across the room” asking other students what the answers to a test are without getting caught. Do teachers really not notice these things?
“I don’t know if our teachers pretend to not notice what’s going on in their classroom to avoid the hassle of getting people in trouble or if they honestly are oblivious to what’s occurring,” Pablo said.
Cardoso takes a different approach to catch his cheaters.
“I’ve left a scantron with the wrong answers on my desk knowing that a student would come ask me pointless questions, only so she could peek at the answers,” Cardoso said. “She sure did, and she failed the test.”
Carlin concludes by saying he “doesn’t understand” why so many people cheat, especially the people with passing grades that cheat “just to be bumped up a little bit higher on their grades.”
“One bad grade isn’t the end of the world,” Carlin said. “Fail with integrity.”
The Eagle Eye Staff surveyed 384 students about their cheating habits and here are the results.
The top graph represents the assignments most cheated on.
The bottom graph represents the method of cheating the students take.