Cheating

Cheating is institutionalised here. You have to get used to it or vainly struggle to find a way around it. I had six classes sit their exams this week and I only caught two examples of flagrant cheating, but I had a few goombas get implausibly high marks, so hmmmm. Hmm indeed. I felt I was being hyper-strict and vigilant too.

Well when I say 'cheat' it's perhaps a tad unfair, a big part of this is 'helping.' Generosity and helping thy neighbour is so much of a natural, done thing here that if a student asks another for 'help' during an exam s/he can't really turn them down. I've seen lovely kids struggling with the compulsion to help others during exams.

Anyhoo, the flagrant cheaters - helper and helpee - after being given many chances were punished by having their exams taken away there and then and told they were getting zero. The helper got all teary - 'Teacher, consider me your brother, I am sorry, my father is poor and cannot put me through another semester etc' It was kinda unsettling but I stuck to me guns. (The helpee's English was too poor for him to be able to appeal to me, thankfully).

The fact that students can cheat to pass, are spoon fed and treated leniently can be depressing because it feels like what you are doing is pointless. The undeserving usually pass and lots of them know this. They always ask for 'help' and 'bonus marks' - both mean marks for nothing, and there is an undercurrent here at the English Language Centre administration that everyone, regardless of ability should pass into the next level. It's quite disheartening, but I'm trying to look at the small picture and the good moments of genuine learning and fun, rather than getting bogged down with the wider injustice of it all. Just like Palestine itself!

(And of course I become part of the problem - I later reduced the cheaters zeros to a ten point reduction. They still aren't satisfied and are trying to creep around it. I must not bend further!)