CHEATING BLUES

                                              

Little less than a month ago, Harvard University revealed that it was investigating over the alleged cheating by their students in a final year exam in one of its undergraduate courses. While it came as a shock to many, some of my college friends were in their cloud nine. They said that it was their ‘eureka moment’, for they had finally found the fitting answer to all those charges that belittled them as cheaters: Go see, even in Harvard, they do it!

Honestly speaking, cheating culture is deep-entrenched among the students in every society right from the lower classes in schools up to the university level. Majority of us have embroiled ourselves in cheating practices during our student lives in one form or the other. Return back to your memories of the yester years and you will certainly be amazed to recall how you would take along the ‘guess papers’ inside the examination hall well secured inside the socks; how you would make frequent whirlwind trips to the toilet or how you would encrypt the answers in the palms. But no doubt, coming to this high tech age, the experience has become even more enthralling given the power of cell phones and modern calculators with which we are equipped.

The crowd of parents and locals outside the exam halls during the much touted annual SLC exams bears testimony to the gravity of the situation. More embarrassingly, during such board examinations where the schools and colleges engage in a cutthroat competition to bring out the best results, the teachers themselves encourage such foul plays. They just desperately roam around here and there inside the examination hall in a ‘whisper in the ear’ drive. They even urge their students who are quite bright to assist the ones sitting beside them. The environment therein looks so chaotic that one can hardly believe it is the students taking their exams. The million dollar question now is: what is propelling us to resort to such unfair means? Have we lost the confidence to pass exams in a free and fair manner?

 Not that we study less, or that we are poor in studies, but yes, we have lost that precious factor: Confidence. We are in a constant pressure to excel in exams. No matter what the caliber of the student, parents and teachers expect nothing short of excellence from them. Take it, even the brightest of students is not without worries; he is all preoccupied with maintaining his top ranks. For an average student, his only concerns remain how to appease his parents by improving his grades while those below par are bent on passing by hook or by crook. It is against this backdrop of stress that we end up doing what we very well know is unethical: colluding on an exam. Seeing everyone copying from the notes, even the outstanding students can’t resist the temptation and finally jump on the bandwagon, fearing that they may lag behind if they do it on their own.

Hence, so long as our parents and teachers don’t stop troubling us with all their humungous expectations, cheating practices will continue to thrive, yes even at Harvard.