I have come across numerous instances of cheating and I must say the students are very innovative. There are numerous ways to tackle this situation.

I make it a point to have a group discussion on the topic of Value Systems on any day. I ensure that some members of the group who resort to cheating participate in the discussion with other students and make it compulsory for each student to put forth his views. During the course of the discussion I also intervene by asking them questions like, What would you feel if you find that your best friend has been lying to you all along ?

I tell them that honesty is a pre requisite for success in one's personal and professional life. I also make it a point to get the views of the students who are part of the audience and give them various examples to help them realise the extent to which honesty is valued in a person and also the price a person pays for being dishonest. This hits them really hard.

Another solution could be to change the sequencing of questions and have around ten different question papers with the questions remaining the same but only the order of questions varying across all the ten question papers. You could also work out a seating arrangement wherein students who resort to copying will virtually have to turn around to see their group member. This is something they will never dare to do.

Hi Claire

I did overlook the suggestion given by Dr Cohen with regards to changing the sequencing of the question paper. I am sorry for that. I mentioned that students are indeed very innovative. I was just trying to tell you that similar instances do take place down here also. You probably felt it was a repetition. I believe there was absolutely no ambiguity in my statement.

You had not specified the age group, but even taking that into consideration, what beats me is how do students manage to get admissions to such prestigious places of learning when everyone knows the behaviour pattern of students down there. As you mentioned, if it is ingrained into them, I pesonally feel there has to be some method like psychometric tests which can be administered during the admission process to screen out such students.

Your point of students rehearsing before the exam also puzzles me. Is it that they get to know the seating arrangement well in advance ? I strongly believe that any educational institute needs to be ruthless during the process of invigilation. The disciplinary norms needs to be set very clearly and any student trying to communicate through gestures or any other method should be warned and if it continues he should be chucked out. The space available for the seating arrangement can never be taken as a drawback, particularly when the teachers know what is going to happen. Is the institution encouraging cheating ?

From your query I felt you were trying to suggest that most of the students fall into this unethical category and it is a perennial problem.  You subsequently mentioned that this group fortunately is a minority. You are going to get this set of students in each country. There is no question about students being saints.

There has to be ruthless measures executed to ensure that such students are identified at the time of admission itself to ensure that future problems are nipped in the bud. 

The word EDUCATION means bringing a person out of darkness and showing him the light or the right path. 

Hi Claire

I now got the clear picture. Thank you so much for educating me on the exact scenario. As you rightly pointed out, even when we know students are being unethical, we have to remain silent spectators because we do not have the evidence and this is quite painful for the teacher. I can now clearly visualize and feel what you must be going through.

Hope this doesn't sound too weird! And also that it's practical enough for you.

There's an excellent talk by Dan Ariely on ted.com about cheating. He's done loads of experiments and while it sounds a bit odd, what worked for him was getting the students to agree that the test they were about to take came under the MIT Honor Code. This played on their subconscious values (rather than just being an appeal to their better natures) and produced measurably better results. The other thing that worked for him was showing a negative role model from another university displaying bad values thus strengthening their in-group values.

It may sound a bit odd but if space constraints prevent you from separating the students out, then using a bit of psychology might help. Rather interestingly, I showed this video to a class of 16 students, 14 of whom admitted they have cheated. The other 2 students stated categorically that they never had, and never would. On the same website is Zimbardo talking about the Stanford prison experiments and the Milgram experiments. I suspect these 2 students are also the ones who would refuse to administer the electric shocks.

I'm not saying that raising awareness of the issues will solve the problem but it's probably worth a go; I'd be very interested to hear how it goes. 

cheating is when a person misleads, deceives, or acts dishonestly on purpose. For kids, cheating may happen at school, at home, or while playing a sport. If a baseball team is for kids who are 8 or younger, it's cheating for a 9-year-old to play on the team and hit home run after home run.

At school, in addition to cheating on a test, a kid might cheat by stealing someone else's idea for a science project or by copying a book report off the Internet and turning it in as if it's his or her original work. Copying someone else's words or work and saying they're yours is a type of cheating called plagiarizing