I walk around the room when the students are writing,
but I hate to do the police-checking when I suspect they have something
pre-written under the paper we let them provide. It makes me feel creepy (where’s my basic
trust?), but when I’ve overcome by aversion to being a suspicious creep and
have checked, I’ve usually found that sure enough, there was something there.
This wasn’t always the
case. When I taught at Golden Gate
University, the students were not allowed to take any books or papers to their desks when they
took the TOEFL writing test. Actually,
most of my own test-taking situations as I was growing up were that way. (More on that later) The students doing the TOEFL part of their
writing had thirty minutes to deal with a simple, unannounced topic. The school provided them with paper, but they
couldn’t have brought a pre-written piece anyway because they weren’t given the
topic in advance, and they weren’t given dictionaries at all. Except for the departmental final, our
students usually know the topic because it’s based on the reading we’ve been
doing in class and of course they’re encouraged to bring a dictionary, which
they sometimes pack full of good stuff. And have you read some of those
dictionaries even without the crib sheets?
They have sample essays in them already!
But here’s another possibility.
If the students know the topic is going to be the pros and cons of
mandatory community service, they can write the essay at home, look busy during
the first thirty minutes, and then hand in the one they wrote at home. The good thing about that is that it
motivates them to write an essay before they come to class. The bad things is that we might mistake it
for in-class writing.
I think the way we conduct tests
in general invalidates them—not just for in-class writing, but for Scantron
tests too. Do you remember how we were
tested? A teacher said, “Stop! Put your pencils down!” and 250 pencils made one clicking sound—although
I do remember a time when only 249 pencils made that click. A little boy decided to finish what he was
doing, and he continued to mark his Scantron instead of joining in the communal
click. The teacher gasped in horror and disbelief,
clutched her hand to her heart, and stomped
over to the little boy to grab his Scantron and tear it in two. “This is invalid!” she said.
I’m still suffering for that
little boy. How could he have stooped so
low? (No, that little boy wasn’t
me. But if I’m suffering this much 60
years later, I wonder how he’s doing…and what new criminal activity he’s been
up to.) We can roll our eyes at that
over-zealous teachers. But do we gasp
and clutch our hand to our hearts enough? We’re so casual in our departmental
finals because we don’t want to intimidate the students, and we want to catch
up on our reading and socialize with the
other proctors. Eventually someone says,
“The time is up” but there’s no mention of those pencils, and as people collect
the booklets or the Scantrons, some students continue to mark their Scantrons, sometimes
making the changes their friendly classmates suggest. Once, failing to get the attention of a
student who was continuing after half of the Scantrons had been collected, I brought this to the attention of another
proctor, and he nodded. He thought the
student might need some extra time. I
know some teachers think it’s rigid to enforce the time limit, but it could
also be called fair. If the students have
special needs, they can get extra time
through DSPS.
When I was in non-credit at
John Adams and Peggy Doherty was Resource Instructor, she instructed us on how
to proctor. She said the desks should be
arranged with wide aisles. I was
surprised when I came to the Ocean Campus and saw the testing places here—often
lecture halls with immovable desks that had no space between them at all, and the
students had to sit on each other’s laps.
Only the most confident or least curious students would be able to keep their
eyes on their own paper. I remember my
own curiosity when I took tests in school and my eyes went roving because I had
so much respect for the opinions of the other test takers and just wanted to know what they thought. Our students do too, and we set them up so
they can do their best pair work of the semester.
I once did a unit on cheating
with my advanced class, ESL 40 it was called at the time, and they were very
candid about what they’d done or seen done. Some of them even expressed anger for teachers
who let students cheat. One student
spoke contemptuously of a teacher who praised a student for being a model
student as reflected in her great test results after they had seen her with her
book wide open at the back of the classroom during the test. But they described quite a lot of different and more subtle
techniques. We make it so easy for them
to implement them.
Still, I don’t think most of
our students are cheating. If they were,
wouldn’t the results be a lot better?
