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!

School Life -- Now and Then

My younger son, Anuj is in Grade 12. These days, he is trying his best to maintain or improve his marks so that he may get admission in the university of his choice. His school is about 3.5 Kms from our home. I drop him at his school in the morning around 8.30 am in my car while going to my office. After finishing his school, he goes to Milliken Mills Public Library and studies there until 9 pm when I pick him up and bring back home. These days, competition to get in a good university has become quite tough as so many Indian, Chinese, Sri Lankan and Pakistani families live in Toronto and surrounding areas and they want their children to excel in higher studies.

When I look back at my school life in Moti Bagh, it is in total contrast to the school life in Canada. My school was just across the road from our home. I would run to the school after hearing the first school bell. And, in the afternoon, when the school finishes, I would be at home before the bell stops ringing. After eating the lunch, I would quickly finish whatever home work was assigned by the teachers, and then its playtime in evening. I don't remember if I studied long hours even during examination days, at least not until in the last year in the school. There were hardly any extra-curricular activities in the school. The school library was nothing more than a show-piece. We used to have one library period of 40 minutes once a week when our class could visit the library. Even during that period, we were only supposed to sit quietly on the floor; at the most one student used to read a story book to the class. We were never encouraged to look at the books or get a book on loan for reading. For sports, we were assigned a peroid once a week and a class of 40 students would just kick a soccer ball in any direction — there was no concept of teams. Most of time during those soccer adventres, I would not get a chance to touch my foot to the ball even once!

The teachers in our sarkari (Government) schools were generally good in teaching the syllabus. However, there was never any discussion or counselling about what a student could do after finishing the school. Since we lived in a typical babu colony, there was no guidance even from neighbours — all of them were clerks in Central Government Ministries. Many students and their parents did not have clear idea about the true cost of studying a particular course, and if they could get loan for higher studies. (There was no Internet in those days! ) I think, because of the lack of information on the part of the students as well as their parents, some of the students could not have reached their potential.

Now let me go back to my last year in school. As I mentioned earlier, I just used to finish the home work and go to bed by about 9.30 pm. One day, my classmate Rajan, asked me if I studied until 11 pm or 12 am. I told him that I go to sleep at 9.30 pm — that all. He was surprised by my answer and suggested me that I should study a few hours during night, preferably until midnight or even later. Thanks to Rajan, I started studying for one hour in the night, which I slowly increased to two and half hours, and this helped to improve my marks in the final examination.