JEDDAH, 24 May 2004 — As exams draw closer, students race to invent new ways to cheat. The old days when students wrote answers on small pieces of paper and hide them in their clothes are over. Now they are using advanced technology including the cell phones and other gadgets. Car horns bridge the gap between high and low tech.
There are excuses aplenty, chief among them that questions are too difficult and there is insufficient time to study. But others argue if students put one tenth of the ingenuity they expend on cheating into studying for exams, they would all pass with flying colors. Is there something about cheating that is inherently more attractive than studying, regardless of the effort involved?
“Cheating is bad, but it runs in the blood of many students,” Sameer Al-Khaldi said. “Some students do it for fun or to help their friends. Some students are forced to do it because they are threatened that if they don’t help they will get a beating after school.”
An easy way to cheat is for a student to write in pencil on the chair of the person sitting in front of him. “If the teacher walks by he can’t read it, and it’s very difficult for teachers to inspect every chair in the hall,” he said.
For high school student Habib Ali, cheating is a challenge.
“I do it to prove to the teacher that I can cheat under his nose whenever I want to,” he said. “I don’t call it cheating, I call it helping people in need of information.”
A week before the test, friends gather at his house. “We practice a body language that only we can understand. For example, if I move my foot to the right, it means question No. 1. If that question is multiple choice, I move my right foot back and forth three times, which means C is the correct answer.”
All the students behind him has to do is watch his movements and record the answer, then pass it to the student behind, and so forth.
“The best part is that all this happens right in front of our teacher and he can’t prove that we are cheating,” he said.
Ahmad BaSalem takes a dim view of the practice. “It’s a bad habit and it’s against Islam,” he said. “I have seen students smuggling their cell phones into the school and turning off the ringer. They call their friends and whisper questions to them. They put in an earphone and wear the shummagh to cover it.”
Other students fold tiny pieces of paper in their pens when the teacher isn’t looking.”
Muhammad Al-Harbi also disapproves. Cheating is useless and a sign of weakness, he said.
“Once I spent all night writing historical dates on tiny pieces of paper. When I got the questions the next day, I thought they were easy because I had inadvertently memorized all the dates.
“So why cheat if we could study?” he asked.
“I think the easiest way to stop cheating is to either install hidden cameras in the rooms or have different version of the question sheet so the students sitting next to each other have different answers.”
But there he may be underestimating the ingenuity and determination of students.
