At the beginning of the year, I choose a number between 0 and 1000 to two decimal places and write it on a piece of paper. I offer 100% on the first test to any student in the room who correctly guesses the number. Of course no one has ever yet guessed correctly, and the students always grumble about it being practically impossible. I respond that when I give two versions of a test, if someone claims that he “guessed randomly and happened to pick the number that was the answer to the other version”, this is equally unlikely, and will result in a zero on the test.
I always do make at least two versions of each test. The versions do not have a version number, and the differences are subtle. (Same wording, but either different quantities or subtly different chemical formulas, such as Na2HPO4 on one version and NaH2PO4 on the other.) I pre-shuffle the tests and hand them out such that any student who looks at the tests around him will only be able to see the other version.
I usually catch some cheating on each of the first two or three tests. (Most often in honors classes—three so far this year.) In each case, I give the student a zero, but in response to pressure from administrators, I allow a re-take for up to 80%, but only after the student’s parents give me permission in person or by telephone to allow the re-test. (I explain that I need to ask because some parents actually want their students to suffer the full penalty for cheating. This is, of course, a complete lie, but the students accept it as truth.) The advantage of this system is that as far as the parents are concerned, it makes me the good guy (coming across as wanting to offer a re-test, wanting to involve the parents, and being willing to defer to the parents’ wishes). Once I’m established as the good guy, the kid is the bad guy, and the parents usually become more involved. This means the student’s effective punishment for cheating becomes (at least in many cases) that he loses his parents’ trust, and his parents nag him about his grades and his academic honesty for the rest of his life.
One of my favorite cheating stories was from a test I gave several years ago. One of my policies is that if a student comes up with a nonsensical answer, he can get one point of partial credit by (correctly) explaining why the answer doesn’t make sense. This particular girl wrote “Doesn’t make sense because the correct answer is supposed to be 11.2.”
A colleague of mine once confiscated a cell phone that went off during a test. The student put up more than the usual amount of resistance to giving up the phone, but the teacher eventually prevailed. He placed the phone on his desk and noticed a text message arrive on the display that had answers to questions on the test. When he looked more closely, he saw that the text message with the answers was from the student’s mother!
Originally posted to the ChemEd-L discussion list.
