Why is cheating at schools in Poland accepted?!

but still don't know what deflection mean... :(

Cheating everywhere will never cease to exist as long as there will be bad schooling systems and people of different idiosyncrasies. It's never "supposedly" accepted.

Just put cameras in exam places and analyze results statistically and cheating stops.American method guaranteed.

I think that teaching little children that ściąganie is seriousely wrong would be enough... It's a fault of not enough strict teachers... actually no strict teachers are the greatest problem of polish education. They are underpaid so they don't have motivation to bring up kids... they just "teach" them the educational programme and no ethics...

Deflection is where you divert attention away from the thread. Cheating is known in many countries and I can understand the kids doing it due to intense pressure.

We don't want to build a pressure valve like that seen in Japan. They have 'gogatsou byou' which translates as 'May illness'. Students jump off the bridge into the Dotombori river because they didn't get the grades they needed to gain entry to university. That may seem extreme but when a culture squeezes you like that, you either cope or buckle.

In greek national exams if you get caught cheating your paper gets confiscated you get grade zero and you lose right to participate in the rest of the exams.Some students even proceeded to.minor operations to transplant microphone and headphobes under their ear lobe.

Yeah, I know if you lost job there is forest of suiciders... In Japan there is no visible poverty - not because it doesn't exist... it just that's a shame to be poor so they try to maintain ilussionary fine exterior as much hard as they can.

But Poland is different. Its more likely that there are too little expectations. Kids don't know how to learn in efficient way, they are not study in regular way and try to learn everything in the last minute. Some can make it while for others it's imposible so they cheat. But mind that even if you cheat, to pass a test you have to know something. So cheating is like 2 points more in the test, you won't pass it only by cheating... unless you know all the questions earlier.

Suiciders, that was a Bushism, zeti. Nice one :) It has a cool look to it :)

Yeah, past papers help but a lot of it is just guessing what will be in the test. The multiple choice papers always gave hope :)

Very true about the Japanese notion of kao/face. They have to be seen to be doing well and those that fall by the wayside really fall as their society is not the most forgiving ;)

you don't have any english equivalent for "samobójca"?

My wife seems to think that it's 'suicido' but we'd never say that in Britain. Pulled from the deeper recesses of something :)

Anyway, cheating? It happens.

I'm watching the Polish news and they're talking about how sophisticated the kids have gotten in their cheating on the Matura.
They text on Facebook, among other imaginative methods, looking for answers to problems! What's equally incredible is the fact that if caught in the act of ściąganie nothing really happens of consequence to the offender!

The offender has to sit the exam again.

If you want to eliminate cheating get rid of education through testing. Tests are for the most part BS. They don't prove anything.

very true

[agreed
quote=pawian]The offender has to sit the exam again.[/quote]
Not much of a deterrent lol

Yes, British and Australian schools apply harsher penalties:

For some major tests, such as GCSEs in the UK or NAPLAN in Australia, you may get all your test results cancelled if you are caught cheating. For example, if you were found cheating in a math test, you would get all your math marks taken away and also possibly in every other test such as English, geography, etc. The worst sanction is to be banned from all the exam boards for five years, which means no A-levels or university. (You can guess what that will mean when you start looking for a job.). Consequences for cheating in the Junior/Leaving Certificate in Ireland include being banned from state exams for five years.

It is a good solution and it might be useful in Poland too.

yes


That's more like it!

The strongest deterrent in the UK is the strict indoctrination throughout childhood that:

- If you tell the truth, everything will be ok
- (and you must tell the truth)
- If you cheat in an exam, it is pretty much the worst and most shameful thing you could ever ever do ... you should do well on your own merits.

Believe it or not, that is why cheating was unheard of at my school. Apart from one American girl who wrote something on her hand, and none of us spoke to her much after that. She was tainted.

In Poland it is totally different, because of their geographical position. In Poland being able to cheat/to judge when it was ok to tell the truth or be honest without blindly trusting was ... a matter of life or death. We weren't invaded by Germans or Russians. The Poles were. They had to become who they are in order to survive. The cheating in schools is just one example of the heritage of an occupied-country mentality ... and people still live as if in times of war, in my opinion.

So, as a teacher in Poland, at first nearly having fainted when I had a classroom of English teachers doing FCE and all of them cheated (all), I have now learnt to understand, accept, and forgive ...

So cold

Google and find tens articles like this one:

March 2012
Tens of thousands of students in universities across Britain have been caught cheating in exams and coursework - and the trend is on the rise, according to a investigation by The Independent on Sunday.

Over the past three years, more than 45,000 students at 80 institutions have been hauled before college authorities and found guilty of "academic misconduct" ranging from bringing crib-sheets or mobile phones into exams to paying private firms to write essays for them.

But officials last night warned they were fighting a losing battle against hi-tech advances - which means it is becoming increasingly difficult to detect the cheats.

Tessa Byars, an advice services manager at Anglia Ruskin University Students' Union, warned that advances in technology had made it "nearly impossible" for universities to keep up.

independent.co.uk/news/education/education-news/45000-caught-cheating-at-britains-universities-7555109.html

Hundreds of students from Clear Lake High School in Houston tried to pull a fast one on their teachers by texting one another answers to a final exam last month.

newsfeed.time.com/2012/01/07/200-houston-high-schoolers-caught-cheating-on-exam

Experts are warning that the number of cheating teachers is also on the rise, both in UK and US :

telegraph.co.uk/education/secondaryeducation/8940781/Exam-boards-how-examiners-tip-off-teachers-to-help-students-pass.html

csmonitor.com/USA/Education/2011/0705/America-s-biggest-teacher-and-principal-cheating-scandal-unfolds-in-Atlanta

Don't make this about Britain!
I was in the first year where the English language exam was 100% coursework. One of my classmates had a private tutor who my classmate requested of him to get him a grade B. So the tutor wrote all his essays for him and got him his B grade.

More recently, an examining board was secretly filmed giving the questions that were going to be in a forthcoming final year exam to the school teachers on a plate. When the examining board cheat...

Statistics about who cheats are easy to find - yes, no doubt cheating is now rife in the UK as well, and yes, of course, naturally, coursework was an open invitation to parents and others to get A*s for the kids ... so that the exam results would look better (that's another story) ... but this question is about cheating being ACCEPTED. There is a fundamental difference between Poland and the UK in this. In the UK it is a shameful thing to do, however many do it. In Poland, how well you cheat is a badge of honour. So we should be discussing what it is in the Polish (and of course other European, but this is a Polish forum) mentality and national identity that makes cheating a sensible, clever, necessary skill. That is the interesting thing. And for that, I think, as I said before, we have to go back and look at what it was in the Polish environment that made this skill essential ...

this would never be allowed in the uk

You exaggerated....gently speaking ;). Only morons are proud because of that (cheating).

oh, this is bad..
have you ever ask the school management 'bout this?

From my experience of court procedures in Poland it's as if it is embedded in Polish Law. You can lie endlessly in court, and even when your found out, you can continue the lie after lie approach. In a UK court when found out you would be torn to shreds by a barrister and humiliated, in "contempt" of court and pretty much finished from that point onwards as nobody could believe any further evidence. Of course it doesn't stop people. It's a natural defence but in Poland it reaches levels above and beyond our comphrension here.

Absolutely. Lying in court is the first thing Poles would expect to do - almost like a kind of obligation ... 'I swear to tell lies, complete lies, and nothing but outrageous lies, so help me God ...' ; )

Seriously. It is breathtaking to us sobbingly-truthful Brits. Almost awesome the way Poles lie.

Poles attend university dont study then cheat on the exam or just buy off or suck off the professor that is a fact as I know a girl who f@cked her way to a law degree

i dont think that would have been 'news' to be discovered by someone in the family were it true.
I expect you do not mean Cambridge University but perhaps UEA which has a campus in Cambridge.

" I don`t value British education too much" well an awful lot of other people do monia, and there is a v good reason for that.

Oh Monia, how you made me laugh! I'm sorry to disappoint you, but I know exactly what I'm talking about.
I'm Polish, I studied at two different Polish universities, both public, both full time, including UAM, which is much much better than your UMCS (UMCS came 31st according to Rzeczpospolita ranking).

You had only oral exams? You must be really old, when I studied ( I started in 2001), most exams were already written. Even when my parents studied many exams were written! And yes, people were cheating; it's not seen as something wrong by most people in Poland.

No one would cheat where I studied in the UK... But in Poland I'm not surprised, as half of the subjects were not connected to the course, taught by people whose knowledge and mentality was stuck somewhere in the 70s.

So, dear Monia, I'm an educated woman too. But, unlike you, I have experienced both education systems and I can compare them.