Have you ever cheated on a test?
I.e. taken the scope of this forum to a somewhat different real life situation?
Me, I know I have. But only on subjects I really didn't like or didn't think all the content would serve me later on. For example, I had Geography and Philosophy in my last year of school, when I had chosen a computing career, which I think made no sense at all. So when exams for those subjects were close, I summarized my notes into a text file, dropped them into my phone and/or MP3 player (which can display text in its tiny screen), and used them as reference during the exam, when all conditions were fine. (This was a matter of lighting the screen up, glance at it, write some lines down, refill my mental buffer, write, rinse and repeat. Using my music player didn't require the light-up phase, which drew less attention, but this was at the cost of having to deal with SMS-language notes on a screen the size of a Windows taskbar button.)
I've been through a few close calls, but never actually got caught doing it. We knew which teachers were more alert and likely to constantly sweep the room looking for signs of dishonesty, which ones didn't care so much, and which couldn't possibly be foolish enough to believe we were "just checking the time" with our mobiles, or that the cheatsheets were "a draft for question 2", which isn't unheard of. Yes, we had a ranklist of sorts, and except for a couple of teachers which looked like the What.cd of their domain (and thus theoretically cheatable with very tight restrictions, something not deemed the effort by us), it was always possible to get away with it, with the right doses of stealth and speed.
These days, we're on the age of information, which makes this stuff easier. My already-mentioned phone and music player were of great help. My friends used similar tactics with their respective gadgets. Cameras and image viewing were a blessing when we had to work with maps, diagrams, or copy formulas that were hardly intelligible in text form. Some guys went the extra mile and even kept HQ copies of their class notes and exercises, taken with their cameras, in case they proved necessary. In the case of an emergency, tapping my phone's home button would close everything and go to the main menu - a sort of panic key. That is not to say the more basic methods, such as tiny cheatsheets or scribbling the tables with useful information (hard to spot among the "graffiti" other students tend to leave over time) were never used, however.
Some particularly tough tests required coordinated teamwork, from simple things like writing questions to your classmate on the side of your table and waiting a reply made in the same fashion, to swapping sheets and checking the other's work, or even the outsider technique, where someone who usually finished quickly or didn't care about passing kept a copy of the questions, answered them outside of the classroom (you're asked to leave when you're done with the test), then came back for "something he wanted/forgot" and swiftly passed us the answers.
I'm not bragging here. And obviously, not everything about cheating is fine and dandy. I reckon I've heard most of the usual reasons not to do it - cheaters never prosper, you won't learn anything, you'll need X knowledge later in life even if you think you won't, it's just not right/not fair for those who don't cheat, it's better to fail honestly than to succeed like that, etcetera, etcetera. Allow me to dissect each one of those and let me transmit my personal point of view.
- "Cheaters never prosper" - see the third paragraph of this post. I encourage you to read this, too.
- "You won't learn anything that way" - that's the whole idea. I don't care about this subject, but I have to pass it. I don't want to spend time and energy studying things I don't give a fuck about just so that I can fill a little paper with that, get it back with a number written on it, and then forget that stuff forever. I am aware of that you do need to know at least some geography, some history, some math, a small bit of everything, because if you don't know where the hell you're standing, how your country came to be, or can't add fractions together, you're going to have a hard time, but that's to a certain extent. Which leads us to the following point...
- "You'll need to know this in real life, even if you think otherwise" - is that so? Well, I think you're wrong. I don't think my job will require me to pinpoint the location of all hydroelectrical power plants my country has in a map, retell what we think we know about stuff that happened 1500 years ago from memory, or solve a quadratic equation. If you ask anyone who isn't a teacher about that stuff, it's likely that they'll remember little if not nothing about that. And if I'm wrong, let me find out myself.
- "It's not right" or "It's not fair" - it's not right, huh. Killing people is not right because you irreversibly take their life away. Stealing isn't right because you physically deprive someone else from their property. And this wouldn't be right because... at the very most, and assuming the reasons not to cheat pinpointed above are correct (and I don't think so), you damage no one but yourself. "It's not fair"... life isn't fair. If I cheat and get a good mark while you study and do not, then well, tough luck? In this ethical scheme of yours, you've chosen to do things well, shouldn't that be its own reward? My actions have done you no damage, for if I had cheated and got a bad mark, or got caught and failed the exam, you'd still have failed as well. I don't see all the fuss about "being fair" towards others or not. I take a risk and do something I may or may not succeed at, and doesn't even actually guarantee a good mark per se.
- "It's better to fail honestly than to succeed by cheating" - this gibberish doesn't even merit a response. I don't know who the hell came up with this, or what he was thinking, other than raising self-esteem a bit?
So, title. Discuss. If you have, tell us when, where, how and why. If not, then just why, I guess. And what you think about it. Let the community as a whole enrich from your post, whatever the experience and outcome.
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Originally Posted by *Soldier*
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