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Your Best Exam Stories?
KevlarGorilla asks: "I'm sure Slashdot users have done their fair share of university exams. A good portion may be going through the process right now. Many tales have been floating around the internet about cheating (successful and not), cram stories, and tales of post-test celebration, most often in the testing room itself. Recall any first-hand experiences and write them down in a few short paragraphs. If you've been waiting to clear your conscience, or share your experiences, now is the time."
In response to all of those who are against cheating... I dislike cheating as well, its dishonest. But we must really ask ourselves what kind of educational system we have that makes kids WANT to cheat. Instead of fostering a system in which education is a fun and enjoyable activity we promote one where kids fill a pressure to pass: passing becomes more important than learning. On the one hand I think that honesty is an important value that must be supported, but a part of me says: let them cheat, they'll soon enough encounter the real world and figure out what they really needed to know and what they didn't.
Looking back on my school days, I remember often doing exams "in group", where we'll take a crack at the exams and compare answers, learning how to work with other people under pressure was (I now think) more important than knowing how to figure out complicated integrals alone (and when was the last time I did that). If caught, this kind of thing is considered cheating. I used to not like school that much, until the point where courses got difficult enough that other students were there because they wanted to; difficult enough that we could bring out calculators and text books in the exams and still spend 8 hours doing them (I distinctly remember some EE Linear Control exams). The teacher would let us take smoking breaks and bring lunch. Copying someone elses exam wasn't an option, because of the pages and pages of calculations we had to show for our efforts.
Now-a-days I justify this to myself saying that the kind of class (or professor) that requires this kind of thing (learning by rote memorization) is stupid anyway, and nothing good can come from craming to memorize something you'll forget 10 minutes after the exam.
I never memorised physics or calculus formulae - I derived the formula needed for each question from first principles when I reached a question needing that particular formula.
I owe this ability to a great high school physics teacher, Tom Leys (now deceased, what a loss!) of St Bede's College, Christchurch, New Zealand.
Whenever he introduced a new concept we would learn the principles first, and then the formula.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
A day before a history exam, one of my friends went to the teachers room to ask a question. He was not there at that moment. The friend saw the standart envelope that exams are carried with, took away one of the papers, photocopied and spread those to all of the class. I also got one but didn't check the questions, folded and put it in my pocket.
When I left the school, i decided to tear that paper without looking and worked all night, studied all the book from start to end.
Next day when the exam papers were given out, you should have seen all the faces. The friend didn't put the paper back, the teacher counted the papers, understood the theft and changed all the questions.
I got the 3rd highest grade after two friends who didn't show up the day before the exam and didn't know the questions were stolen.
Conscience is a good thing.
less is more
> But we must really ask ourselves what kind of educational system we have that makes
> kids WANT to cheat
You don't have to *make* people want to cheat; people just naturally want to cheat. I've even caught myself thinking up (sometimes elaborate) ways to cheat, even though I'm one of those guys the other kids always despised for breaking curves. (I'm not much smarter than average (honest, I'm not), but I perform well under pressure (don't get nervous, and when I have a mental block on a question I just mark it in the margin and come back later), and I tend to study rather more than average.) And it wasn't because I cared about the grades either; I was never motivated by grades. I studied because I wanted to understand the material.
I thought up (albeit never used) ways to cheat for no good reason, just, uhm, *because*. It's part of human nature.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.