Stealing the Answers: Prevaricators in the Classroom
The Chronicle of Higher Education
May 14, 2004
By JAMES E. McWILLIAMS
When the last accused cheater arrived at my office door (at my request), he appeared defiant and intimidating. “Yeah, uh, you wanted to see me,” he sneered. The young man stood in the doorway, his arms crossed in front of his chest; he stared intently past me, out my window, and smirked when I asked him to have a seat. He refused. I asked him again, adding “please.” He rolled his eyes and remained standing. It was a bad start to a meeting that seven full years of graduate school hadn’t prepared me to handle.
There’s no clearer sign of my professorial greenness than the fact that I teach a history class with 375 students and am dumb enough to give routine quizzes that cannot be run through a Scantron machine. My four TA’s find my aversion to multiple-guess exams quaint but nonetheless tolerate my quirky idealism with good-natured patience. To make matters more complicated (for them), I scramble the order of the questions on each test. It’s a surefire way to nab the practitioners of the all too common art of cheating.