So, funny story. On Monday night, my students had their first test. We’d had a quiz before, during which I caught five cheaters. I was disappointed, but I figured it was the first major assessment, and that, after seeing the pretty rough consequences faced by said cheaters, the problems would diminish rapidly.
As I had before their quiz, before Monday’s test I discussed, in great detail, the consequences for cheating and what exactly constitutes cheating. This includes looking anywhere but at your paper or straight up, having anything on your desk aside from a pen and your test paper, rummaging in your desk, etc. My kids also have to put their English books and notebooks on the floor where I can see them too. I don’t take chances. I want to create “testing barriers” of sorts to erect around each student, but I haven’t found manila folders or something similar yet. I’m on the lookout.
Anyway, the test was going just fine for perhaps twenty minutes. Then, in the very back row, two very, very good students put their heads together, looking at the same paper and whispering.
I didn’t want to do it. Every part of me wanted to believe that they weren’t cheating, that Alanna was just asking Caroline a question for clarification, but ultimately it didn’t matter. Ultimately, they’d heard the rules the same as everyone else, and I knew I had to follow through.
I made my way slowly to the back row, sighed not for dramatic effect but because I really, truly didn’t like what was about to happen, and ripped up both of their test papers. I informed the class that those two students, and their team (my class is divided into four teams), would lose five points. The two girls would also, naturally, get a zero for the test.
After that, the test continued without further incident, but I was most displeased and did not pretend otherwise. This is where the problems came in.
Each evening class runs for two hours. I’d given the kids the first half hour to study, they tested for about half an hour, and then I still had an hour left. My original plan was to play an English name game. No no. Instead, after collecting the last test paper, I decided it would be an excellent idea to lecture the kids (in Chinese, naturally) about why cheating was wrong. Never mind that I couldn’t do it properly, with the nuance and emotional appeal I could put into an English speech. Never mind that I had not planned out, at all, what I was going to say. Never mind that I was relatively sure the two girls whose tests I’d taken probably hadn’t cheated at all. I take cheating very, very seriously, and my class needed to be told exactly why.
I drew diagrams on the board, I asked rhetorical questions, I presented them with the stoniest face I can muster. Fifteen minutes, and probably 50,000 mistakes later, I was done. But there were forty-five minutes of class left. This is where I should have stopped. I should have had the kids do some mindless English copying or sit silently or something. Instead, I decided I may as well forget about that fact that, in addition to not being able to speak Chinese, I cannot read it, so I informed my students that they all needed to write me essays about why cheating was wrong. They were to be silent, and writing, for the remainder of class.
I was brutal. Every time I heard talking, I deducted points. They’d never seen me go without smiling for half as long. At 8:25, I collected their papers (some of which were mercifully short), dismissed them with a “You should think about how to make tomorrow better” rather than with my usual “Thank you, class,” and swept back to my room.
Then I laughed, because I realized that I now had 49 essays, in Chinese, that I needed to read. This took hours but went better than expected. Five or so essays I simply could not decipher, because whether in the states or in China, middle school boys can have some darn awful handwriting. While reading the rest, however, I learned new words, like “shameful” and “look down on,” and I even had two students ‘fess up to having cheated on the evening’s test. (The two girls whose papers I’d taken, as expected, had not, but I still had to give them zeros for breaking the rules.)
Did my kids learn? I’d like to hope so. I guess next test I’ll find out.
Did I learn? Well…at least maybe if I continue to do things this stupid my Mandarin will improve faster.
There's no "correct" sol'n to the problem of cheating, and I think asking the students to write essays, to reflect, is a good idea. It is always important to set procedures and boundaries. :)
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