Aaron Adams’s Blowhard Blog

This article caught my attention today: Some Schools Ban iPods to Stop Cheating.

MERIDIAN, Idaho — Banning baseball caps during tests was obvious — students were writing the answers under the brim. Then, schools started banning cell phones, realizing students could text message the answers to each other.

Now, schools across the country are targeting digital media players as a potential cheating device. Devices including iPods and Zunes can be hidden under clothing, with just an earbud and a wire snaking behind an ear and into a shirt collar to give them away, school officials say.
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Mountain View recently enacted a ban on digital media players after school officials realized some students were downloading formulas and other material onto the players.
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Using the devices to cheat is hardly a new phenomenon, said Shana Kemp, spokeswoman for the National Association of Secondary School Principals.

I spent probably the most harrowing 18 months of my professional life working at a high school. I took care of several labs of about 150 Windows machines , give or take a few. Each student that sat at each machine during each period of the day saw that machine as completely their own, to do whatever they wished, including destroying the thing so as to make it unusable until I was able to fix it, which was almost always an ordeal. Usually the quickest way to restore the machine to working order was to reimage it, and the images were stored on a Netware server behind a chain of 10mbit hubs, which served all the other machines in the labs. Figure 150 machines * 6 periods per day * 5 days per week, and that’s 4500 hours per week students had to lay waste to machines, versus my 40 hours to clean them up. Even if my week had been 80 hours, I’d still be behind. And then two sets of bosses giving me directly conflicting orders almost constantly… Talk about a test of patience. But I digress.

Anyway, one thing that was true almost a decade ago was that the students didn’t need portable gadgets of any kind to cheat. They used the computers themselves to cheat. There were ways to lock the computers down, but that required equipment the school wouldn’t buy; or it required inconvenience to the students, which they would in turn exaggerate into crisis for the teachers; or it required inconvenience for the teachers, which in turn would become issues for school administrators. The teachers didn’t know much about computers and didn’t want to - that’s why I was there, in their estimation, and their hands were full managing hormoned adolescents all day. I can’t say I disagreed with them. Nobody had an easy job.

And one day it just dawned on a very young me that cheating isn’t a technological problem, it’s a behavioral problem. From the article:

“You can just thread the earbud up your sleeve and then hold it to your ear like you’re resting your head on your hand,” Nelson said. “I think you should still be able to use iPods. People who are going to cheat are still going to cheat, with or without them.”

Banning the popular gadget of the moment isn’t going to stop cheating in school. These kids cheat because of bad parents. You’ve raised your narcissistic, spoiled, lazy, entitlement queen children to accept cheating as a matter-of-fact occurrence without any accompanying guilt or thought of consequences. It’s going to be done, so might as well do it, is their thought. Technology isn’t to blame, parents and the nasty children they’ve raised are to blame.

In the end, the teachers at the school I worked at accepted the fact that eyeball patrol was the only way to catch cheaters, and the students kept cheating. I got frustrated with the job (and the shitty pay) and left. But it was certainly a learning experience and what I’ve come to realize about school, teachers, and parents could fill a volume. The ultimate lesson of that volume, I think, would be that most problems at school start at home, and ultimately, the quality of parenting is directly reflected in the child. No teacher or school can change that. Parents, the wet cement that is your child will eventually dry, so start giving a damn and take time to shape that wet cement into an actual human being that will be an asset to society rather than a liability.