Is it ok to cheat?
Introduction Cheating has seemingly become an everyday phenomenon in exam situations at most of Hungarian universities. Almost every student prepares for the examinations making handy little bits of paper, contemplating on where to sit and, during the exam itself, the most sophisticated even use their mobile phones to surmount the numerous gaps in their knowledge. Day after day in the exam period stories such as the following circulate in the corridors of the School of English and American Studies, as well as other faculties of ELTE and other universities in our country. It may seem surprising, but the story is not fiction, in fact, a student at ELTE told it to HVG last year. 'I always elaborate on all the possible topics at home and write them down on A/4 sheets of paper. My special 'examination suit' has an A/4 size pocket. I always put the sheets into it, and, at the examination I wait until the topic of the essay is given out, then pick the right sheet in my pocket, and h!and that one in.' 2.1. Research Questions Is cheating really such an everyday phenomenon as it appears to be? Is cheating so easy to manage? What about morals? 3.1. Theoretical Background Brown, Earlam and Race reported in their practical handbook for teac
that he does cheat sometimes at examinations (personal consultation with Sarah Thomson, March 2, 2000). Unfortunately, the question 'How can you manage so well without cheating?' was not asked either in Utrecht or in Massachusetts - in fact, Hungarian students might have made good use of the answers for that. 4. Method 4.1. Participants As our research group was interested in the opinions of students as well as teachers, so there were two target groups of the survey. On the on hand, the students at ELTE - SEAS irrespective of what year they are or whether they are students at the Dept. of American Studies, the Centre for English Teacher Training or the Dept. of English Studies. On the other hand, there were the teachers at these departments. The only criterion was that every participant should have taken part in some examination at SEAS. All in all, 40 people took part in the survey, 12 teachers and 28 students. It is a relatively low proportion of the total number of teacher! n half (53%) of the cheaters remain unnoticed. 5.3. Is it easy to cheat? Question 4.b - When you were a student, did YOU do any of the activities listed in 2) above? (Included in Teachers' Questionnaire only) It seems, according to the teachers' answers, that decades ago cheating was a much less common phenomenon than it is today. Only 'looking at a neighbours' paper was something most students (83%) done. Using pre-designed cheat-sheets was not a possible method for the students at that time. There was only one teacher who admitted using one. For the results see Diagram 4.b/ Teacher. Question 5.a - Would YOU do any of the activities listed in 2) above? (Included in Students' Questionnaire only) Looking at the neighbour's paper is the most common method which students use. 71% said they would do it when in need. Asking a neighbour a question is less common, but still many students (60%) risk it; the third most popular method, which is used by 46%, is the pre-designed cheat-she! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ In some cases teachers' and students' general opinion was much the same, in others they were in contrast. These cases required further analysis, the results of which shall be discussed in the next chapter. 5. Results and discussion 5.1. What is cheating? Why do students do it? Question 1. - How detailed is the material students have to learn for a SEAS examination? One participant told us, 'I only cheat when the material is too detailed. Dates and other small details are rather hard to memorise and quite easy to confuse. Stress mixes me up.' The aim of the first question was to find out whether the students think they have the argument 'material is too detailed' as a bogus excuse for cheating. The teachers' questionnaire included this question as well to check if there is a contrast between the two opinions. It occurs sometimes that teachers do not realise how much they overload students; this often abets cheating. But that does not seem to be the case at the SEAS. In fact, t! have answered affected by public opinion. Two questionnaires were used for data collection; both are included in the Appendix section. The two variants, the Students' Questionnaire and the Teachers' Questionnaire share many features. In fact, the only difference between the two is that four questions that do not refer to teachers were left out and replaced by others. Both versions consist of ten questions. Four of them are yes/no items including sometimes an 'I cannot decide' option; there are some questions referring to frequency or proportion, and one multiple-choice question. The last item of both variants is an open-ended question where a short (five-line) answer was expected but, in fact, only 3 of the participants answered that one. Apart from this drawback, choosing the questionnaire as our measuring instrument was a good choice. (See Appendix A & B for the two questionnaires.) 4.3. Procedures of data collection We bega
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Approximate Word count = 4121
Approximate Pages = 16 (250 words per page double spaced)
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