Timely crackdown on academic cheating

Our every educational problem is a proverbial elephant in the room. It continues to eat into the vitals of the education system, ending up becoming its inexorable part. But a glimmer of hope shimmered this time in Punjab when its education minister for schools, Rana Sikandar Hayat, declared a crackdown on such a problem — cheating in exams.

He himself raided the examination centres where he caught the examination staff red-handed. Videos of students went viral, wherein they revealed how much they were asked to pay for the answers. The revelations have exposed the corruption in the education system like never before.

The very first sign of the impact of his crackdown appeared when the objective papers of secondary classes stopped leaking during the exams. Previously, before the time for the objective paper was over, the paper was shared on social media. Now even after the subjective paper is finished, no trace of any question paper is found. Tangible manifestation of the crackdown was the suspension of exam officials at various levels.

However, these may sound cosmetic nostrums as the need is to locate and eradicate the causes that rationalise cheating in studies.

As it has been alleged, if the board officials and supervisory staff are involved, it is the love of the lucre that spurs them to go no holds barred. Unjustified it stands as their intemperate acts detonate a flow-on series of malpractices in the whole education system.

Teachers have their own share of blame. Instead of exerting themselves to their full potential as educators, they cut corners and resort to unfair means to get their students passed in exams. As the exam at the secondary level poses the first pass-or-fail barrier to a student’s non-stop academic journey from class one, cheating is but natural.

The involvement of some private institutions in manipulating the whole examination system from leakage of question papers to assistance in the examination hall with the connivance of the inner circles of examination boards has tarnished their reputation boasting of obtaining distinctions in board exams.

The rat race of lassoing high grades has blindfolded all: parents, teachers and institutions. According to a 2021 survey of college students by College Pulse, the single biggest reason given for cheating, endorsed by 72 per cent of the respondents, was “pressure to do well”. Youths often perceive both their parents’ and teachers’ priorities to be more focused on securing good grades than on character qualities, such as being caring community members.

Educational psychologists aver that whenever two goods — educational success and honesty — ram headlong into each other, the lure to be successful is likely to be the more immediate and potent imperative as long as education is stapled with capitalistic gains.

Other factors include the force of different motives to cheat: the desire to avoid failure; the self-serving rationalisations that students indulge themselves into to excuse their behaviour — diluting responsibility with self-delusional “everyone is doing it”; or dismissing their actions because “afterall it harms no one”.

Psychologists identify three psychological phenomena under which people exhibit proclivity to cheating: psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism (‘ends justify means’). People high in Machiavellianism are more likely to plagiarise essays, whereas people in psychopathy tend to impulsively copy other students’ answers during exams, and the narcissists for their social patina.

To stem this rot of academic cheating, efforts must converge on reducing the competitive atmosphere in classrooms, switching exam mode from objective questions over to subjective staple. Our social DNA has mutated from collective struggle to individual effort to excel: it spawns cheating. Repetition of exam questions for years induces lethargy in students who adopt an anaemic approach towards their studies and hanker after short cuts to success.

Published in The Express Tribune, April 8^th, 2024.

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