Zoology-2011. And the Unpleasant Part: Cheating on the Examination and Tightening the Rules
Dear second-year students! You have taught me an unpleasant lesson. Of course, I did not flatter myself with the illusion that no one cheats in the examination in my subject, but until recently I hoped that such cheating did not substantially affect the result. Yet one lives and learns. There were masters in your cohort capable of...
Dear second-year students! You have taught me an unpleasant lesson. Of course, I never entertained the illusion that nobody cheats in the examination in my subject, but until recently I hoped that such cheating did not substantially affect the result. Yet one lives and learns. There were masters in your cohort who demonstrated an ability to copy large chunks from the Internet verbatim right before the eyes of two instructors. The two examples I give here are simply anecdotal. How many more people managed to cheat but did so less ingenuously, I cannot estimate precisely. What am I to do? Believe me, I derive no pleasure from strict prohibitions. But from now on I shall prohibit telephones at examinations and tests in the most categorical way possible. Well, let us begin with examples. A person answers the question “Characteristics of the order Carnivora” and writes the following, spelling and punctuation preserved. “Characteristics of the order Carnivores belongs living forests. Carnivores has food when they hungry, they and bring it to their children. Sometimes they cannot catch their food then they eat their children. Carnivores can be cruel. Some carnivores bites people. Carnivores are different. Carnivores are only in the forest. Carnivora is an order of placental mammals (Mammalia), consisting of the suborders Caniformia and Feliformia. The 11 modern families of carnivores include about 270 species in 110 genera and are distributed almost throughout the world. The overwhelming majority of representatives of the order are classical flesh-eating animals hunting primarily vertebrates...” [IMG_1] (clickable) What do you think this is: a miracle by virtue of which a person, right during the examination, not only advanced enormously in command of the Russian language, but also suddenly became much more intelligent? In that case I hold in my hands an exceedingly rare documentary proof of the benefit of studying zoology for personal development. Alas, everything is simpler. Beginning with the second paragraph, it is a word-for-word article from Wikiznanie, with minor copying errors. By the way, the text there is somewhat odd and outdated, but that is a secondary detail. For other questions, it was Wikipedia; in one case a person copied an article that actually concerned the topic of the answer, in another an article devoted to a completely different question; the person simply failed to understand the distinction. The second example. [IMG_2] (clickable) I have never before seen examination papers that contained something like “A review is presented...”. This simple soul found on the web an annotation to a book related to the topic of the question. That annotation, without any changes, turned into an examination answer. What is more, while checking the papers I repeatedly had the impression that their authors remembered concrete facts surprisingly well while lacking the understanding that would allow those facts to be meaningfully organized in memory. But since the absurdity in those cases did not reach the level of the two examples above, I lowered the grade only slightly, though in fact I often did lower it; I believe that the presence of a coherent overall picture is much more important than small specific facts. During the Saturday examination, T. A. and I came to the conclusion that a reading room had been set up in one of the toilets, but we did not go and dirty ourselves; in my view, inspecting privies does not correspond to the status of an instructor. I do not think a textbook hidden in the toilet helped very much. What is to be done? I proceed from the assumption that the priority in determining my course of action must be the striving to ensure the deepest and most durable assimilation of the sciences entrusted to me to teach. If for a substantial part of you the optimal course of action becomes perfecting the skill of copying Wikipedia wisdom from the Internet, your education will suffer. From now on, at all examinations, pass/fail assessments, and tests, the following rule will be in force. I will announce it before the beginning of written work and then insist on its execution without exception. All students must leave their mobile phones, switched off except in special cases, in their bags beyond their reach. The presence of a student’s mobile phone during written work, regardless of whether it is turned on or off, whether it is used for Internet access or simply as a clock, means that the student stops working, receives a failing grade, and leaves the room. It will be unpleasant for me myself to demand compliance with this rule so strictly. Forgive me, I am very sorry.