Our First Tests

Our fourth week of school has been dedicated to testing our students.
Our students have also been dedicated to testing us by trying to cheat
in any way possible. There ways include, but are not limited to:
writing information on their hands, arms, feet, or other body parts,
making cheat sheets known here as cabulas, sealing through the windows
while other classes are taking the test to copy questions, trying to
use their notebooks, hiding info in their flip flops, etc. Cheating
isn't that different here than in the US, it's just much more
pervasive. Cheating is not unique to Mozambique; many developing
school systems rely on systematic cheating to make up for inherent
shortcomings in their capacity to educate, usually due to lack of
resources, human or material. We covered the topic of cheating a lot
during training, so our students' behavions came as on surprise. As
many volunteers do, we made an effort to put the kaibosh on cheating
from the get-go to set a precident for our classes, but the conditions
here present many difficulties in curtailing less than honest test
taking. Each desk seats 2 or 3 students, making it nearly impossible
to control copying. We also must write the test on the chalk board
which creates many constraints and provides prime cheating chances
while our back is turned. The classes are very large, between 30 to 60
students, so it's hard to keep an eye on everyone. Despite there
challenges, we did a respectable job controlling our tests. We made
students leave the room while we wrote on the chalk board, leave all
their stuff in the front of the class, inspected the room for hidden
materials, and Janet even made them dance to shake any cheat sheets
loose. We each caught several cheaters in each class. We later heard
the students commenting on how difficult it was to cheat and how many
of them were discouraged from trying. Unfortunately cracking down on
cheating possibly contributed to low overall performance on our tests.
Hopefully next time they will channel their cheating into studying!