On tests and cheating

This weekend, my pastor preached a sermon on honesty, during which he mentioned in passing that well over half of all high school students admit they would cheat on a test if it meant the difference between passing and failing. Of course I found this statistic extremely troubling. But it didn’t make me think so much about the pathetic state of our moral culture as much as about the structural defects of mass education.

See, in a setting where teachers know their students for only an hour a day and each class has 25-30 of them, the simple fact is that any student is almost a complete stranger to any teacher. This means that tests become ripe opportunities for cheating precisely because of the teacher-to-stranger ratio.

In the school in my house it is not like this. Because the teacher knows each of our students so intimately and interacts with them so intensively, she truly knows where each of them is educationally. She needn’t rely on a test, and the ability of her students to trick her is virtually zero. Even a tutor would be in virtually as confident a position as she is, if only because of the intimacy of the relationship.

When mom is the teacher, the teacher already knows how you’ll do on the test before you take it.