The trickery used to game formal education

Adam Wheeler has become a celebrity for cheating his way into Harvard. What a cunning fella! For the rest of us who went through some semblance of an education, we all know there are the right moves. To what lengths would students go if all they cared about were their grades, without blatantly impinging on moral integrity? These are the realities of educational systems which have managed to establish the paper-chase as being the most important thing in a student’s life. As much as we have many passionate teachers out there, and equally keen learners, systems are the ultimate driver of behavior, and it is important to realize how rampant these practices are on the ground. I hear them being discussed among the high achievers in college, and have experienced many of them in school. These will only continue and evolve as long as the system does not align objective to incentive.

Welcome to the life of a grade chaser.

1. Choice of Subjects
Always pick the easiest topics if you have a choice. Take a level-one Japanese language class even though you mastered the language in high school. Intentionally do poorly on the aptitude placement test so you are assigned a more basic class. Study past-year statistics of classes across the board and pick those in which more than 70% of students score above an A-. If there are multiple professors offering the same module, pick the one with an easy professor. Even better, if he’s known to be constantly traveling to give conference keynotes, you get more holidays! Once you pick the right subjects, half the battle is won.

2. Impression Management
Ask good questions in class (although you might already know the answer). Borrow homework and notes from seniors so you always turn in perfect answers. Make your answers neat to show you’re conscientious. Ask your professors even more questions outside of class. In some systems, this sets the impression that you’re a star student, and when you get anything below an A-, you have the liberty to simply waltz into the professor’s office to demand a grade-raise. A quick Google search even revealed a how-to guide on changing your grade.

3. Stay only within the syllabus
Because there’s no other incentive not to. Past-year papers (more affectionately known as ten-year series) give you model answers so that every hardworking student can produce the correct responses from a cookie-cutter. Exams are then a mere test of conscientiousness rather than intellect or understanding. There are only so many types of questions that can be set, that you soon learn the frameworks, and can spot topics and questions. In the event that no syllabus is present, and there are two sides to an argument, always respond with what your professor wants to hear, or what is politically correct, even though you might be strongly convicted of the other stance.

4. Exam Strategies
There’s a whole industry of books written about taking exams that I’m sick to the stomach. On the softer side, you learn from your teachers the “how” of answering questions more than the what and the why. You learn that graders are human too – they make mistakes, want more family time, do it for the money, and get bored marking thousands of cookie-cutter answers. Your sole purpose is then to make their job easier. You learn what keywords they’re looking for, write them bigger and highlight them so the grader doesn’t have to read through every single word and will not miss your answers. You thank them at the end of the paper to make them feel a little more appreciated and might just give you a few sympathy marks.

5. Project Politics
Form a dream team in which you can take classes together and group up for projects. If you don’t happen to know anyone in class, get impression management right – A very nuanced strategy is to dress smart and ask a few questions in the first class, that magically gets other bright kids attracted to you to group up. Two things then happen, you either free-ride everyone else’s work and intellect (especially if there is no peer evaluation component), or spoil the market by going over and above what is required for the project. Take note especially of the project assessment criteria and nail it according to the grading weightage.

I’m not even going to talk about the art of cheating (a higher level of creativity), which is far more rampant than I imagined – more than 90% of high school students and 92% college students cheat on a regular basis according to David Callahan. I hear from friends who went through China’s education system, that you’d be sure to be at the bottom of class if you didn’t cheat, they were left with Hobson’s choice. It’s simply baked into some college cultures.

And so we continue to use standardized tests to measure students across the nation, but what do they really measure? Is there seriously no better alternative? The tragic protagonists are the genuinely motivated learners who can’t be bothered with fitting into the system and are hence not rewarded by it. They are soon either forced to succumb, or are shadowed in comparison to those who simply make the right moves. Sometimes, they can’t fathom why in all earnestness, and are driven to depression and suicide.

At the end of a formal education, many who have been duly rewarded for their efforts have mastered three skills extremely well 1) pattern recognition 2) finding loopholes in a system and 3) gaming the system inside out. It’s such a great way to prepare generations of young people for life ahead, and I can only laugh at the irony to see so many of our systems broken and being exploited.

Before you criticize the younger generation, just remember who raised them.