Need Help Friends One Fellow Cheated My Friend

As a fellow student, what would you do when you see someone cheating on a test?

Actions taken by my students over the years:One girl stood, stooped just enough to slap the boy who was cheating off her. Not recommended.One student wrote a note at the end of the test telling me who had been cheating off her.Several students alerted me to the cheating after the test.One student wrote out the wrong answers on her test, then wrote me an extensive note at the end of the test with the correct answers.A student alerted me to cheating with a note attached to her test.Many students do nothing about the cheating for a variety of reasons. As a teacher, I learned to make up 2–4 different versions of multiple-guess tests within the classroom to avoid problems with cheating. English classes demand essays and short answers that are harder to cheat on, and harder on teachers to grade, but better education-wise. That’s not to say that students don’t find ways to cheat. When our school relented on cell phones and allowed them for educational purposes, I caught one student in my class providing assistance to another student in another classroom on a common test that required short answers. With the phone on her desk, she was photographing her answer and relaying it to another student across the hall when my back was turned. I watched it play out until the end and then I provided her with an additional item to send over to her co-conspirator: Gotcha!, printed on a piece of paper that I asked her to send to the other classroom.It was easy enough to check answers from one classroom to another to find her fellow cheater.In some schools, the honor code requires students to report others or face disciplinary action. I know for a fact that there are some students who ignore the code rather than rat on their friends.

My two best friends are married to each other and I just found out that one is cheating on the other. What should I do?

I can tell you from experience that the best thing you can do is stay completely out of it, and distance yourself from them to allow them time to work out their problems on their own. There won't be any way that you can help them without it looking like you were taking sides or helping to contribute to the problem in some way. Another thing…do not tell anyone about the problems this couple is having, not even and perhaps especially not any close mutual friends.The only exception to this is if one or both of them are in physical danger…then you would need to say something…otherwise, keep your distance and keep quiet.

At school, I found one of my classmates cheating on a test, when I told my friends they said to tell the teacher since it isn’t fair, but mom told me to stay out of it! What should I do?

I could weigh in on the ethics but I won’t — yes I will, report them. Instead let me make the selfish case.Without cheating you’d typically have a normal bell shaped curve distribution of grades.If grading on a curve, depending upon how many cheated, the curve distribution gets pushed toward the left.So, depending upon the grading model that the instructor uses, instead of getting a B grade for example, a non-cheater might end up with a C, D, or even an F grade.So, the cheaters are not only helping themselves but potentially hurt the non-cheaters.If I were a non-cheater, heck yes, I’d be selfish and report them.If the grades are strictly numerical and not graded on a curve, then the only people hurt are the cheaters because they’ve learned an interesting “life lesson.”But you can believe the instructor will notice the discrepancy.I recently watched a video of an instructor speaking to his class after his class had access to an important test’s answers and most or all got very high grades. As a result, the distribution was so obviously weighted that the instructor contacted the university’s ethic’s committee.Remember, instructors’ usually have given a test before so they know the expected results and usually know the students well enough that if a student gets an usually high grade it stands out.Without going into detail, this instructor invalidated the test results and destroyed the original test. He then gave the class a couple of options including doing a much more difficult version of the test or he would just fail the entire class.You can believe this didn’t work out as expected by the cheaters and if there were any non-cheaters they were also very negatively effected.So, again, forgetting the ethics for a moment, what should a student looking out for themselves do in this sort of situation?