Disclaimer: I don't know of any high school students who read this blog, so I think that it is safe to divulge this information.
People like to dis teachers for spending a fourth of the year in a Caribbean cabana with a daiquiri in one hand and a chick lit novel in the other, but they clearly don't understand the trials that we face in the trenches on a daily basis. While most New York City teachers have to worry about getting trapped in the crossfire of a shootout or poked in the leg with an A.I.D.s needle, at my school our Waterloo is a cheating epidemic. This happens at most schools, but as we do not face most of the normal issues caused by angst ridden adolescents, we have nothing better to do than eradicating this plague.
My beloved co-worker, "lilsexygina," asked the kids about their cheating history and they admitted to:
* Making an innocuous looking poster with all of the answers on it and hanging it on the classroom wall. This is a stroke of genius previously seen only in Agatha Christie novels. Along a similar vein, during a different test, they hung the questions on the front of the teacher's desk.
* Writing the answers in invisible pen that could only be seen with a special light.
Some that I remember from high school:
* The school constantly had fund raisers in which students sold candy bars for their clubs and teams. Thus, everyone incessantly had candy bars on their desks. A girl in my class purchased a candy bar, ate it, and put the answers to a test inside the wrapper and puffed it up.
* I told this story a while ago, but I have new readers, so I will repeat. Our "A.P." U.S. History teacher gave us a million random tests at the end of the year and he left them all on the table in the classroom. My classmates stole the tests and filled out scantron forms with the answers on them. Unfortunately, a widely circulated answer key rewarded the young scholars with a 59%.
Lilsexygina asked her Facebook friends the craziest ways that they had cheated and here are a few of the responses:
* "this takes a lil work but......gently rip of a the label off a 20 oz. soda...scan it....delete the nutritional info...add in formulas....color print out label...glue back to bottle....pretty simple....lol..."
* "i had a math final where i had my friend come into my school, i went to go to the bathroom, handed him an extra copy of the test, he did it and texted me the answers lol" Note from the editor: This is a devoted friend
* "Small 8 size font on tiny paper"
* "[a] classic is taping the cheat sheet to the bottom of the shoe of the person in front of u lmaoo, everyone has to be in on it tho."
I know that most of you are Mormons, so if you have a funny cheating story to share, just say that a random "third party" committed the offense.
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My HS sophomore German class had weekly verb tests that everyone else aced and I got Cs. Finally someone told me it was because everyone else was cheating. And once I knew to look for it, it was so obvious that there was no way the teacher didn't know. They took the test with their answer sheet under their notebook paper, pressed down on the paper, and read the answers through their answer sheet. An entire room full of it. Since I was worried I'd somehow be penalized for being so far behind everyone else (although I don't think the class was graded on a curve or anything, but I was only 16 or so, so I wasn't that smart), I followed their example for the rest of the year. I expect to be congratulated on posting the longest, dullest comment ever. "One thing we do is tell stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I had to take the ferry to Shelbyville."
ReplyDeleteFor some reason... perhaps extreme nerdiness... I wrote on my hand in French, "For God sake Jim, I'm a doctor not a miracle worker." On my hand in French so I could remember how to say it.
ReplyDeleteMy French teacher grabbed my hand during a test thinking I was a (very bad) cheater.
After a quick glance... she just shrugged and walked away exasperated. But, what else can you do as a middle school teacher but be exasperated?? I seems the only logical option.
For Spanish quizzes we use to write the answers on the board in pager code. The teacher just thought we were trying to memorize pi to like the 200th digit.
ReplyDeleteKids today can't copy this idea as pager code is now a lost language.
I had roommates who worked at the testing center at BYU. They said they caught people cheating ALL THE TIME. Maybe I'm just incredibly naive, but I was sort of blown away by that fact.
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