Cheating is not allowed

Today, I saw an interesting photograph in a the Hindustan Times newspaper. The students of a school in Kohlapur, Maharashtra, India are being asked to leave their shoes outside the examination hall in an attempt to curb cheating. Obviously, students must be carrying tips/answers written on small slips (फररहा) of paper in their shoes.

When I was in school, I witnessed student as young as in Grade 2 cheating in examinations. The most common technique of taking tips/notes inside the examination hall was inside the pencil/geometry box. Students could easily look at the tips hidden in those boxes without being caught. Of course, people used to write answers on their hands and legs hidden under their clothes. Another popular technique was to hide pocket/guide books in toilets and go there to look for answers. Some students used to deploy their friends outside the school who would write down the answers, wrap it around a small stone and through it inside the examination hall. Well, now students have cell phones to communicate, as was shown in the Munna Bhai MBBS movie.

When I was in high school, there was a student in my class who had very long neck. His roll number was one less than mine, so he was always seated in front me. While facing forward, he could somehow bend his neck and read answers from my answer sheets! Surprisingly, he was never caught by teachers.

These days, so much of material is available on the Internet that it becomes very easy to pickup available material and present to the teacher as original. Sometimes students copy ideas and other times, they copy text word for word. This kind of cheating has a name -- plagiarism. For more information, visit http://wik.ed.uiuc.edu/index.php/Plagiarism_and_the_Internet. To counter plagiarism, commercial software are available that the school, university or student may use to check if the work is original.

Why do students cheat in exams and/or assignments? There are several reasons. Most students feel that is okay as almost everyone is doing it, and they will never be caught. May be, they have too much study load that they don't have enough time to do the original work, or the teachers expect exceptionally high quality work from students.

When I used to study in Pusa Polytechnic, we were asked to buy emgineering books that were written by the same lecturers who used to teach us. Those books were basically copy of classic books written by Frederick Emmonos Terman (1900 - 1982) and J D Ryder. Now, that's a different kind of plagiarism!