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    Joined: Dec 2008
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    Hi,

    Not quite sure how to best deal with this. My daughter sat (along with 5 other students in her year) a high level maths competition some months ago. Well, it was really tough, and my daughter came home and told me one of the other girls who sat must have copied her answers. The first 35 questions were multiple choice, and the final five required written answers, and were worth a lot more points. My daughter only managed to have time to work out 2 of the last 5 hard questions (it was the same competition for years 5-7 and she is year 5). The other 3 questions, she wrote totally random 3 digit answers, figuring an answer was better than none.

    Well, afterwards, the girl who was sitting next to her had written her answers on her paper as they were told they could, and she had coincidentally written the exact same answers? Even the randomly chosen ones my daughter had?

    Well, results come out yesterday, and my daughter achieves in top 1% which she is thrilled with.........only high distinction in her year. But this other girl scores just below (distinction) whilst the other 3 chosen to do the competition received no awards.

    What to do.? Just let it go? My DD is well known for being way beyond any other kids in maths in her year, and always achieves way beyond anyone else. What really worries me about this, is the other 3 kids, who now appear way below "the girl who copied".

    My DD wants to say nothing (I guess she still got the best score.....her copying obviously wasn't perfect!) and this girl is a friend.

    Somehow doesn't seem right to me though.......anyone BTDT and have any advice?

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    So the other girl having the same answers is the only reason why your DD thinks she cheated - it wasn't clear to her at the time? What kind of table arrangement did they have? A competition should always have people sitting far enough apart that students can't copy one another's answers without it being obvious; perhaps that wasn't followed in this case?

    I don't think you can "do" anything about it in this instance, really; cheating needs to be detected while it's going on. Pointing our the coincidence of answers at this point is going to incriminate your own DD just as much as the other girl (and particularly as they're friends, they'd both come under suspicion).

    Also, it's difficult to pick truly random numbers in the context of a maths question; it's not out of the question that, in fact, your DD's choice was subconsciously influenced by something in the question or around, and the other girl might have been similarly influenced - seems unlikely they'd come up with exactly the same answers [and is there a possibility that your DD is exaggerating and only e.g. one of her random nos was the same?] , but not impossible. (If the numbers in question truly were random 3-digit integers, I'd be inclined to ask your DD what she thought the probability of just happening to be correct was, and whether she thought that was worth the time it took to write the numbers down, when compared to the alternative use of that second or two to doublecheck a non-random answer!!)

    I would suggest pointing out to your DD that it's in everyone's interests to make sure copying is impossible, and making sure she realises that if her answers are copied she too is going to come under suspicion. Another time, she might request that tables be further apart if she thinks participants seeing one another's answers is going to be inevitable (it's offputting in a test to have to be thinking about keeping your eyes away from other people's work, so she could phrase this as wanting to be sure she didn't accidentally see anyone else's answers). Or she could perhaps choose her own position with care, and/or guard her answers. Unless they were actually sitting at the same table (which would be crazy in an externally run competition!) it shouldn't be hard for her to keep her answers from being copied without being obvious about it.

    Other than that, I'd just treat it as a learning experience. Nothing can be proved at this point, and casting suspicion that can't be proved is just poisonous.


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    Yes, I tend to agree. No, they were all sat at tables, 4 on each. No separate tables. Easily could see each others papers. DD said she had her head down doing hers, so really didn't see the other girl looking at her paper during the test. No, I can tell you, the questions she gave random answers to were so so hard that they really were totally random...............I saw the paper, and her answers............there was no sense to the random answers,! And no, all 3 random answers were copied for each digit.........the results sheets had them there identical. I saw them. I agree, waste of time my DD writing them, but there you go. First time she has done a competition with anything but multiple choice answers, which she knows "a guess is better than a blank", so I guess she just thought the same for the written answers. As I said, my only concern is the
    other kids who did the test. This is a highly respected competition, and their results are used in folios, getting into programs etc. But yes, you are right, what is done is done............say nothing.

    Last edited by stephanie; 10/15/11 08:05 AM.
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    I agree it's a shame that it could affect the relative impressions of that group. Yet personally I would say nothing. It's not appropriate to read other people's work/notes even after a test is over, in order to see that so many written out answers were the same she was not minding her own business (though I fully understand that once a accidental glance shows a similar pattern one would be alarmed and naturally look more closely). And it's clear that not every answer was the same, or the same score would have been obtained. A cheater often will intentionally keep answers from being identical, but it does make proof more difficult.

    If you think it essential then an anonymous note in a teacher's box saying there was a concern of copying by the girl, without specific reference, would alert school staff to watch her in the future. And it might globally serve to make them rethink their test seating arrangements.

    This is a good opportunity to show your DD how to protect her own tests from view by use of scratch paper on top of the questions she is not currently working on, her own hair if it is long, or non-dominant arm blocking view of the paper, etc. Some of those things in conjunction make cheating much more difficult. Yes this should not be necessary but as a smart kid she will always be a target for people to cheat. Preventing copying in the first place protects her from accusations of, "no she cheated off of me", which is often what a cheater will say in their defense. That clever retaliation flips suspicion onto your daughter and needs to be avoided.

    Polly

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    No, no one looked at anyone else's notes secretly after the test. They did it back in class to compare answers..............the whole group who did it in her year did this, with the teachers knowledge (my daughter had asked if she could write on her testbook for this reason). These kids like to discuss the questions after......as results take months. She also asked if she could write on it so she could bring it home to show me, and we could estimate her score! But thinking about it now, maybe the answers were copied from her testbook answers rather than answer book . Yes, she has learnt from lessons from this. But yes, as this is such a hard competition (compared to statewide testing etc), the really top math students are usually identified at the competition. Yes, it is the rest of the group that I am concerned about. Their relative strength in math has been corrupted, which will effect everything from class placement, to grades, pacademic prizes, and even subject acceleration........

    Last edited by stephanie; 10/15/11 01:58 PM.
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    Originally Posted by stephanie
    Yes, it is the rest of the group that I am concerned about. Their relative strength in math has been corrupted, which will effect everything from class placement, to grades, pacademic prizes, and even subject acceleration........
    I think this concern is misplaced. If it were an in-school competition, maybe... but since there's a much wider population that they're being compared with, what matters is where they fall in comparison to that, not how they fall in comparison to one another. If the child who cheated (it seems) has something decided just on the basis of this one thing, then yes, she may get some honour she doesn't deserve, but she's one person, and in any case it would be incompetence on the part of the teachers to base a judgement of a child on just this one piece of information.

    Are you sure you're not just displacing your righteous and understandable indignation, that someone else did nearly as well as your DD and didn't deserve to, onto this concern? TBH at the end of the day, it's annoying, but it doesn't matter. Does it?


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    You are right, it doesn't matter, to my daughter. And no, her result was significantly enough above anyone else's in her year, that it is not important for her. On a school wide basis this result will make a difference for this girl however, and the others she seemingly "beat". Unfortunately, as we all know, most school tests are simplistic, and this group of kids will all score nearly all right, and appear the same. So, when the time comes to choose the 3 person math team for the school, this girl will be chosen. Does she deserve to be chosen? No doubt, after such success with cheating last time, she will try it again in the future. These are my concerns, but I have decided to say nothing. Cheating is annoying, and wrong, but something we must accept it seems when it happens.

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    Originally Posted by stephanie
    Yes, it is the rest of the group that I am concerned about. Their relative strength in math has been corrupted, which will effect everything from class placement, to grades, pacademic prizes, and even subject acceleration........

    If the other girl really did cheat so egregiously, it stands to reason that she had no idea how to do the problems on her own. This, in turn, implies that the next time she does a competition like this one, she'll do poorly. I would say that your job is to ensure that she sits on her own. You may want to ensure that she sits far from your daughter during regular tests during the school year. You could always try to have a quiet word with her teacher, without making an accusation, but just by voicing a concern that maybe something happened but you're not sure....

    It's a tough problem. When I have tough problems, I try to break them down into smaller parts. In this case, they may be:

    • The girl appears to have cheated and appears to have got away with it. What kind of lesson does this teach her?
    • The other children's rankings were pushed down as a result of the alleged cheating. If the girl really did cheat, how will this situation affect them?
    • If word gets out that she cheated and got away with it, how will class morale be affected?
    • Other.

    Can you rank this smaller parts of the larger problem, and then try to determine how to act based on your rankings?

    Once when I was in high school, the kid who sat behind me in algebra was copying my answers during an exam. I had no idea what was going on until he nudged me and asked me to move my elbow so he could read the rest of my answers! I was pretty annoyed. Then I noticed that I'd made a mistake and graphed a hyperbola in the wrong quadrants. I'd also made another mistake on another graph. I waited until he turned his paper in and started erasing as he was passing my desk on his way back to his seat. My score: 102 out of 100 (the teacher made a mistake with the points). His score: 68 (F). It was very satisfying, and it can be a good strategy for discouraging cheaters.

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    Added: I'm going to respectfully disagree that we should turn our heads when cheating happens and accept it.

    The trick is to find the best strategy to stop it.

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    Its pretty simple.

    You should request a meeting with the school director and turn the other child in.

    Cheating is unacceptable.


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