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Thoughtful Exams Prevent Cheating
Joseph C. Bronars, Jr.
To the Editor:I just got around to reading the January–February issue, which focused on ethics. The article “Honesty and Honor Codes” stimulated a memory of two instances of the honesty of students without the support of an honor code.
The first was in a summer session at an urban day-student university—my first teaching experience after earning my Ph.D. I had left the room for a smoke during the first test of the term. At the end of the period, I was attended by a small delegation of the serious students to inform me that some students had taken advantage of my naive idealism and cheated on the test. I appreciated their concern and responded by monitoring all future tests (and identified the two culprits by the totally identical answers they had written).
The second was in a small residential college—a seminary, no less. I was visited in my quarters one night by a student who informed me that an answer key to the next day’s test was being circulated. My response was to change the order of the questions and let the cheaters suffer the consequences.
But this time, my longer-term response was more substantial and applied to assignments as well as tests. I stopped giving assignments and tests that, in a sense, invited cheating by being general, impersonal, and therefore inconsequential. My tests were questions that required thinking and not just memorizing. My assignments required a choice of topic and a preliminary draft, followed by revisions in response to my comments. Of course, this required commitment of time and effort to the teaching-learning process, which, after all, is one of the important ethical elements of our profession.
Joseph C. Bronars, Jr.(Education), retired
Queens College,
City University of New York
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