Tech-savvy exam cheats getting away with it
Pupils brought up with social media outwitting teachers as boards ‘struggle to stay ahead of the game’
EXAM boards are struggling to keep pace with modern methods of cheating because pupils are more technologically advanced than their teachers, the chair of a new malpractice inquiry has warned.
Sir John Dunford said that while boards are familiar with the more “traditional” cheating techniques that have existed for decades, they are now faced with the threat of “known unknowns”.
In his first interview since being announced as the head of an independent commission into cheating, he said that digital communications pose the greatest threat to exam integrity. “Traditional exam cheating is something the system has faced for generations. The exam boards, schools and colleges are alert to it,” he told The Daily Telegraph.
“What I think is particularly interesting for the commission’s work is to look at the effect of sophisticated digital communications. Remember, we are talking predominantly about young people who are very often more advanced than their teachers in use of social media and digital communication.”
Sir John, who has received a knighthood for his services to education, said that exam boards “know all about” the cheating risks posed by sophisticated calculators, laptops and ipads.
“But then you start to get new technology coming in. To what extent can we future-proof the system?” he said.
“That is to say, thinking about the implications of technology that is just around the corner. I think it is not easy for the exam boards to keep ahead of the game.”
Last month it emerged that exam boards have set up dedicated teams of digital experts to scour social media as part of efforts to clamp down on cheating. A “huge amount” of time and effort is spent looking for signs and indications of malpractice in exams online, the heads of exam boards said.
Sir John, a former general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, said that youngsters have a certain “degree of sophistication” when it comes to their knowledge of social media sites. “I am not a great authority on social media,” he said. “I am on Twitter, but don’t really understand how Facebook works and so on.
“For example, I don’t fully understand how these things work, but if you had a closed social media group where a group of young people are only communicating with, let’s say 100 other young people, then no one else could find out about that.
“Then you have potentially a dangerous situation, if at some point one of those hundred managed to find out what the questions were going to be in tomorrow’s physics paper.”
End-to-end encryption on popular platforms such as What’sapp or Facebook Messenger means that unless a member of a group conversation leaks its contents to the public, it is impossible to know what information is being shared.
Sir John said his review will not differentiate between privately educated pupils and those at state schools.
Official figures released in January showed that last year 2,715 penalties were issued to candidates (0.01 per cent), along with 895 to school staff and 120 to schools and colleges.