ONE boy got his Spanish grammar cheat list folded up so small he managed to hide it in his ear. But he had squeezed it up so much it almost got stuck. He was there poking and prodding to get it out for ages." The Old Etonian grins as he recounts the story of a classmate who tried to cheat - and failed.
For as long as there have been exams, there has been cheating. Few schools are without their hoary old stories about those past legends who got away with it and the flops who didn’t. As the years pass, it is the chutzpah required to make the effort i
n the first place, and not necessarily the success of that effort, which is most likely to remain implanted in a school’s folk memory.
Last week, it appeared a new name could be added to the ignominious roll call of cheats. Allegations surfaced that Prince Harry had cheated in his art A-Level course at Eton, with part of his work being completed by a teacher. Art mistress Sarah Forsyth, who is taking Eton to an industrial tribunal over what she claims is her unfair sacking, said she was ordered to help the prince pass his A-Level. Forsyth produced a tape recording from May 16, 2003, in which it is claimed Harry, when asked about his project, admitted: "I was, like, a sentence in it."
Did he do it? Edexcel, the exam board responsible, said the recording was "inconclusive", and provided insufficient evidence for it to reopen an investigation held when the accusation was first made last year. That inquiry, which was conducted in secret, cleared Harry, 20, of wrongdoing. In any case, does it matter? The third in line to the throne is unlikely ever to be required to submit a CV emphasising his credentials as an expert on art.
If he did co-opt some expert help, however, Harry would not be alone. His only mistake would have been to break the first rule of cheating: don’t get caught.
Cheating is rife in Britain’s schools and universities. The advent of the internet has made access to information, and to research carried out by others into study subjects, incredibly easy. ‘Cut and paste’ is the modern student’s friend.
Research released earlier this year by consultancy firm FreshMinds, for the national Plagiarism Advisory Service, found that 25% of recent graduates admitted they had plagiarised work at least once while at university. Of those, 16% said they had plagiarised more than once.
Fiona Duggan, manager at the national Plagiarism Advisory Service, based at the University of Northumbria in Newcastle, said: "Research has shown that around 5% of students will never ever cheat, while a similar percentage of students at the bottom will always try and beat the system. The rest are somewhere in between."
It goes on further afield, too. A report released in 2002 by the Josephson Institute of Ethics in the US reported data from a survey of 12,000 high school students indicating 74% of them had cheated on an exam at least once during the previous year. This was a jump of 13% over 10 years, 3% over just the previous two. There were similar troubling figures about stealing and lying, which led Michael Josephson, the president of the institute, to suggest cheating had become something of a national norm.
Magnus Linklater, Scotland on Sunday columnist and old Etonian, has fond memories of the cheats of his childhood. "There were some who wrote some key quotes on their shirt cuff," he said. "Others slipped a piece of paper into the sole of their shoe, or even tried to get into the exam room beforehand to stick a piece of paper underneath the desk with chewing gum."
Few, however, were ever successful. "To be honest, the chances of getting caught were so high, and it was so cumbersome to fish a piece of paper out, that it really wasn’t worth it," he added.
Tom, a contemporary of Prince William’s at Eton, has similar tales. "At least trying to cheat was pretty common," he said. "There were all the usual tricks: coughing as you asked a question to your neighbour, or dropping a pen and whispering while you picked it up.
"Others would hide notes in the loos and nip off there halfway through. The teachers would never follow you into the cubicle itself. I don’t think there was anything too serious going on, though, of course, we never get to hear about the best cheats."
Cheating has been boosted by the boom in electronic information stored on the internet, along with the ease of cutting and pasting text into essays. One website picked at random last week claimed to offer over 100,000 free essays alone, each taking just seconds to download. Other sites claim to offer "plagiarism-free" essays, providing tailor-made work within eight hours on subjects ranging from management, law, philosophy or history, as well as medicine, science and technology.
Other cheats simply bypass the worry of study to buy degree certificates straight from the internet. One site claims to offer complete school exam board results for £80, or any UK degree certificate, complete with watermark, for £175. Degree transcripts cost a further £70.
More worrying, despite the introduction of an online search engine for plagiarism prevention, which checks essays submitted against over five billion web pages, research found that detection rates were as low as 3%.
Universities, however, believe that enough is in place to stop the cheats. A spokesman for Edinburgh University said: "We take it extremely seriously, but there has not been a noticeable recent change. People do cheat, but measures such as the software are in place to catch them."
Janette Locke, spokeswoman for the Scottish Qualifications Authority, said only a tiny minority of the 142,000 schoolchildren who sit exams in Scotland every year cheat.
"There have been less than half a dozen cases in the past couple of years of cheating in the exam room," she said, adding that mobile phones must now be left outside. "Most of those have been breaking rules such as taking in mobile phones, notes, or interaction with other candidates. Cheating is pretty easy to spot in exams."
However, coursework completed outside the strict confines of exam halls poses more of a problem. "We also take coursework very seriously, but you do sometimes wonder if you are catching everything," she said.
For every cheat who slinks off into obscurity, there is one who goes on to greater things. When Sir Richard Branson, 52, revealed that he cheated at Stowe, his father Edward was upset. "How can you possibly admit to cheating in your exams at school? Think of the bad example you will give," he said to his son. Yet Branson can’t have cheated that successfully as he left school at 16 with just three O-Levels.
As for Prince Harry, he has been cleared, but will his reputation survive intact? Ingrid Seward, editor-in-chief of Majesty magazine and author of the biography William and Harry, believes that harsher criticism should be reserved for the art teacher, Sarah Forsyth.
Seward said: "It think it is extremely odd for a teacher to have taped a conversation as she did. Harry is such a friendly, naughty fellow, and she led him on with her questions, that he could have just said it for the sake of it even if he didn’t mean it. It seems an awful shame, because whether he did or did not cheat, he will be tarnished with it.
"I’m sure we all did something bad at school," she said, before swiftly adding, "but it was such a long time ago that I can’t remember much about it."
