What Would I Do If I Caught a Cheating Student

We All Have to Survive Somehow

Exams are hard. We all know that — especially university students do. Some of them are harder than others, and every time the difficulty is linked to the professor in charge. Some professors like to make student life hell, and others will provide you with enough material, so you can get by and learn what they teach you.

When it is time to take these exams, you typically sit in a lecture room where you have nothing but the exam itself, a pen and paper, and yourself. Yet, for some students, this is not enough, so they resort to methods in concealing help during the exam. To prevent this, universities station supervisors — lookouts, in other words — in exam rooms whose job it is to spot such cheaters.

And it came to be that I found myself in this very situation. Not the cheater but the supervisor, thankfully.

Naturally, I asked myself what I would do if I found a student cheating during the exam. How I answer that question and why I want to tell you in today’s blog.

Today, one single student is taking the high-frequency technology exam. As unspectacular as it sounds, at least it is an exam for a master’s degree. Thus, that there are only a few students is to be expected.

As such, my job is easy indeed. I have to look at the student here and there and make sure he does not use anything that is not allowed during the exam. Sounds easy enough. But the problem is the duration of this boring event. A full three hours are set for the processing of the examination. How do I fill these long hours of what is practically waiting? Of course, I am writing a blog while also being paid by the university. And so I sit here with a full bladder, writing and occasionally glancing at the student, knowing that I am not allowed to leave this room until the exam is over.

What if the unthinkable happens, the adrenaline rushes, my heart rate pumps up, and I catch my student cheating? What would I do? Take the exam away and let the student fail or let it pass? Naturally, the student would say the latter. However, I must do what is right, so let me rephrase that question:

What would Batman do?

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A cheating student is an obvious sign. She is struggling and has not learned enough. Unlike a cheating wife or husband, this time, the cheater was not drunk, nor was it a simple mistake. To cheat in an exam requires conscious preparation. In any case, the cheater is guilty.

But would I truly punish a cheating student? He did me no harm, after all.

That is true, but there are consequences for society, one would say. Who would want to let a doctor, who flunked in all his exams, near him?

Yet, we must understand that a degree is a path through a broad spectrum of academic fields. And specializations do exist.

Imagine a mechanical engineer who wants to specialize in the electric power train of vehicles. There is no need to know everything about flow mechanics, for example.

Typically, there are two reasons why students cheat. Either they cheat to pass the exam at all — regardless of the grade — or they want to get the best mark possible and feel like they have not learned enough to get the A. In my opinion, evaluating the title question is crucial for the first case. For the second case, I would not care. Simply because passing the exam is enough. If the student wants to polish up the certificate, I would call it the employer’s fault for giving so much credit to the grade instead of the student’s overall specialization and skills.

So how do we evaluate the first case? We do not know if our student passes until after the exam. And then it is too late to punish him for cheating. If you accept his exam, you accept his cheat. Also, you can not anticipate if a student will fail an exam. For that, you typically do not know enough about the person.

I did not know my student until the very moment he sat down to take the exam. As such, I do not care about the first case either.

For me, one thing is clear. If you would have given any student, who finally holds his degree in hand an exam from the first semester, chances are proportionally high that he would fail. It is simply because with each new semester, you do not use all the things that were topic in a previous exam. At least, this is the case for engineering.

And what we do not use regularly, we tend to forget. So in my mind, there is no point in punishing a student for not learning the things he is almost guaranteed to forget. Because currently, our exams are not compatible with the complete course of a degree. Or, figuratively speaking, we use tiles for one long path that do not match each other in the slightest. The result is a walk on an ugly road, on which our students have to change shoes constantly.

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