Tales of prospering cheats

Cheating in Australian universities is on the rise and the small number of students who are caught is only the tip of an iceberg, according to an associate professor of statistics at Macquarie University.

John Croucher says academics should face up to the fact that cheating is an endemic social problem but has found Australian universities unwilling to discuss the issue. "I found it very difficult even to get an idea of how many students are disciplined in any one year or what sort of punishments are handed out," he said.

Professor Croucher suspects fewer than two in 100 cheats are ever caught because most are very competent. He describes instances at a Sydney university where a student changed the photo on his ID card so an impostor could sit the exam. In other cases, students obtained medical certificates claiming they were unwell during the exam so they could sit another if they failed.

One university found so many students were bringing in post-exam medical certificates that it insisted the students must have had the complaint for more than a day for a certificate to be accepted.

At another institution, after streams of students left the examination rooms to go to the lavatory (supervisors listening at cubicle doors could only hear the loud rustle of paper), a rule was introduced barring students from returning to finish the exam.

At some universities exam papers are broken into sections and students only allowed to go to the lavatories between the sections.

Professor Croucher recalls one student who arrived at the exam room wearing a bright orange and green baseball cap with matching jacket. Every few minutes he put his left hand into his jacket pocket.

Eventually the suspicious supervisor asked the student to take his cap and jacket off. He had hidden a cassette recorder on which he had pre-recorded numerous hints, phrases and facts. The headphones were concealed by the cap.

Another entered an engineering exam with a full plastic bottle of raspberry-flavoured mineral water. He explained he needed the liquid to soothe his sore throat.

The student had previously soaked the label off and written copious formulas on the back, then re-glued it. The notes could not be seen while the bottle was full but, once the level went down, it could be tipped to reveal the crib-sheet label. A fellow student later told what he had done.

Professor Croucher says a study of the academic literature suggests that cheating ranges from 33 per cent to 75 per cent of all students and that supervisors must also know the latest techniques that cheats use. Programmable calculators, radio transmitters concealed in pens with cordless earpieces for receiving the answers, pagers that can receive information broadcast from outside the exam room, and mobile phones used by students in toilets to call for help are among other technological techniques modern-day cheats have used.