Probably. I think when you are paying for something you give the teacher more respect and try and use tuition time to the best. I think the old maxim of never getting a friend to do something for free works here.

From a technical stanpoint I am curious. Does anyone know how they do this. High school graduation exams are going on in Italy. My wife tells me that on the news she saw that the exams began at 8:45 by 11:00 questions and answers were posted on the internet.

So, how do they get the questions from the class room to the internet when they are taking the tests. And then how does one who is taking the exam and needs the answer get it. This sounds like some "great" use of technology. And finally why, what's in it for the people distributing this information?

The student gets the exam questions, transcribes them ona piece of paper and drops them to his or her accomplices waiting outside the window. Quite simple.
Actually, this is only useful to the newspapers: the "questions" are not a number of short questions to be answered in a few lines: in this case getting a response could be sueful even if it came at the very last moment. Rather the first written exam is a long essay or the analysis of a literary text, in both cases the exam requires a rather long and rich written text. Even if the titles are brought out , the mere task of writing down the text by another person, getting it into the school and having the cheating student transcribe it takes much longer than the 6 hours scheduled for the exam.

So you think it's just a newspaper story, not put into practice, as in actually somehow copying text. Could a person prewrite an essay and bring it in, if they knew the question, or even have someone else write it for them?

The story is not that the titles of the "temi" do leak out, the story is the titles (questions) themselves. Since theis is an exam through which most Italian went through, most of us are interested in what's beeing asked this year (I just read the "prima prova" titles and swore on reading the history titles: I wish it was the one asked when I was in the exam, instead of that silly title on "neoguelfismo": I could have put up quite of a show on writing about neocolonialism and immigration!). I even know people who wait for the titles to try to write the essay at home, as a pasttime.
That some people try to sneak in prewritten essays is no news, the point is that unless you know in advance what are the essay going to be on, it's hard to prewrite a text, and since the titles are chosen on the very morning of the exam in Rome (several different ones are prepared, than at 8 am one group of questions is drawn and the corresponding data is stransmitted to all schools) it's virtually impossible to know in advance which will be the good one. And since an essay (written in 6 hours, don't forget, and with no books except dictionaries) a too short, or too long, or too detailed essay is immediately suspect. What some students do, in the age of cellphones, is to bring in two cellphones: one they hand over to the commission, the other is hidden. When they ask to go to the toilet, they phone a friend that does some research for them so that they can include some more data.

I am scared by the 8 pages of replies, so I will just mention something.

Provided cheating is always wrong, has somebody mentioned a very deep difference in Italian school culture re. NorthAmerican "school culture", which is that here students are not in competition, they are rather a group "against" the teacher. This is why they don't see the worst side of teaching because their good mark does not damage anybody else (they of course do not think that they learn nothing) and they're helping helps the group.

This is very different in NorthAmerican university where competition is high because the title is worth something and if somebody else gets a good mark without deserving it, he also gets better chances in life than the honest student who gets a lower mark.

Here, where titles are practically worthless, a good friend sometimes is better than a good mark.

I teach at the university and I have found out that terror stops cheating. The first students I see talking or looking around is kicked out of the exam immediately. That keeps students good.

I teach English and had to monitor a middle aged group taking a major test...everytime i just went to look outside the room and my back was turned they would cheat (loudly i must say) and i would tell them to stop.
They did it every chance they had, even right in front of my face and it pissed me off so much!
i had to tell them over and over again not to cheat. so the ones who were cheating when it came time to take their oral exams i gave them a lower grade. i thought it was right.

This is the reply to Deirdré on cheating at scool although long after the original messege was sent. I think that cheating in school is a bad thing, but it is not the cause of other bad Italian habits. I'm sure that your daughter is very disappointed abuot the situation, but that could be even worse: just immagine Ross doing a great test and not have anybody else copy from her. That was sort of what I was doing in high scool and one of the reasons why everybody hated me. I was doing what I thougt was right and accepted the consequences, that's what I whoul tell your daughter. It's a matter of making choiches in your life. Then you also have to learn to be flexible, accept some compromise and not expecting for life to be perfect. But I myself still need to learn a lot about this....

Italians have a totally different interpretation of cheating. Mostly it's a reaction to an overbearing govt which takes the position you are already cheating (even if you aren't) and penalizes accordingly. So in order to break even, a little cheating is in order (try declaring the entire revenue on the sale of your house and see what happens).

This trickles down to school level, where cheating is seen as an art by students. I used to invigilate FCE exams in Florence, and we couldn't even let them use their own pens in case they had crib sheets rolled around the ink cartridge inside.

Add to this the natural Italian impulse to help those less fortunate and there you go.

quote:

So in order to break even, a little cheating is in order (try declaring the entire revenue on the sale of your house and see what happens).

Odd how we rationalize away these things. We're not responsible for our actions- it's the government and society's fault.

One way of looking at it, I suppose. Our neighbour tried to declare the full amount he'd gotten on the sale of a piece of land and the fisc walloped him with a tax bill larger than the sale price, because they assumed he was under-declaring like everyone else. Salt of the earth guy, but that nearly sent him under--in a way I guess it did: 8 months later he died of a heart attack.

We left Italy just before the Mani Pulite purge, so it stands to reason laws have changed in the interim.