 Wandering
Eyes
By Michael Penn MA'97
Photos by Jeff Miller
David Hoferer never knew how to cheat until he became a
teaching assistant. As a student, he worried too much about
his assignments to think about subverting them. Now, his instruction
is getting subverted, and that has piqued his interest considerably.
“I've learned about a lot of cheating technologies
that I never knew about before,” says Hoferer, who is pursuing
a doctorate in environmental studies. “And some of them are
really pretty ingenious.”
Such as the time a student taped a cheat sheet to the underside
of a baseball cap. Or when students programmed equations they were
supposed to memorize into sophisticated calculators. Or when one
student said that he was looking around for the clock — which
apparently he thought was on his neighbor's paper.
All of those things have happened — or allegedly have happened
— during examinations in Physiology 335, a five-credit leviathan
of a course that Hoferer has assisted for four semesters. With an
enrollment that usually exceeds two hundred students and a thorny
set of four two-hour examinations, the course is like a semester-long
stress test. During midterms, some students become so frazzled that
they forget to fill in their names on the answer form.
Occasionally, students also forget their honor, a reality that
keeps teaching assistants on patrol during examinations.
“I don't like to watch them. Sometimes I feel like
the wolf watching the sheep,” says Hoferer. “But all
it takes is one person cheating to make the test unfair for everyone.”
This is the new terrain of academic integrity. In an age when cheating
has evolved to be faster, easier, and often nearly undetectable
— when Internet sites sell pre-written papers, when computers
come with cut-and-paste functions, when fifty bucks buys you a programmable
calculator, and when even the most timid student can use a handheld
digital device and sneak onto the Internet in the middle of an exam
— no one can afford to look the other way. Universities, which
strive to uphold the high virtue of fair play, are being challenged
as never before to instill a spirit of honor among their students.
And it's not easy.
In Physiology 335, instructors take extra measures to derail academic
misconduct. Exams are scheduled during evenings, so that they can
be held in larger auditoriums where there is room to put empty seats
between students. They've even outlawed hats. But there always
seems to be a new fault for some determined cheater to discover.
During an examination this spring, for example, one test-taker reported
hearing repeated beeps from a neighbor's cell phone and suspected
she was using the phone's text messaging function to get answers
from friends. “We'd never thought of that,” says
Andrew Lokuta, a lecturer who coordinates the course.
“I think we can catch a lot of it,” he says. “But
how much we miss, we'll never know.”
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5, 6
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