Brown Couch
Semaphore Sam
This week the Brown Couch looks at student cheating. It was reported last week that essays written by Oxbridge students were available to buy online from upward of £500. The Brown Couch has investigated other internet-based exam services such as Stan's Exams (www.stansexams.com). Owned by Stan Kalowski, once a cleaner at Imperial, the company's main service is "Precision Revision" - in which students pay upward of £200 an hour for one of Stan's employees (known in the trade as a "Knowledge Man") to do revision on their behalf. During the session, the Knowledge Man tackles the difficult revision work facing the student. We spoke to Ralph, a 2nd year chemistry student and one of Stan's current clients. "I've been working a lot with Montgomery - an expert Polymath and Classicist. When he's doing my work, I generally lounge around on Queen's Lawn or traipse around campus. I worked with him a bit in the first year but I didn't do very well in my exams. This year I've been working a lot more with him but despite that, my first exam was last week and I still found it really hard nigh impossible."
For students with more money to spend, they can purchase the "Executive Exam Plan". Students spend the month leading up to the exams involved in Precision Revision with Sir DeVille Saint-Clare the highest ranking Knowledge Man in the business. When the exams arrive, Sir DeVille uses a faked swipe-card to legitimately sit all the exams in the student's name. We spoke to Sir DeVille at his London residence.
With a grey handle-bar moustache, chainedmonocle and diamond cane, he looks every bit the academic Hercules you'd expect. "I started as a knowledge man in the 1950s after obtaining my 3rd undergraduate degree and 5th PhD all from Cambridge. My work used to take me on excursions all around the globe I've sat exams on behalf of the Prince Regent of Papua New Guinea as well as Mao Tse-tung's nephew."
Sir DeVille speaks 19 languages and is acknowledged as a world leader in almost all fields. He moved to Stan's Exams in 2000 to reduce his workload at the start of his retirement. When asked if there'd ever been any problems with ID checks when sitting exams, he just chuckled. "Things were a lot easier 40 years ago. Fashions have changed and I think that now I look a little out of place in my full evening suit [with tails, a cummerbund and silk gloves]. My slow, sloping cursive script and Latin colloquialisms also looks slightly arcane nowadays. Technology is also making things more difficult. During the last exam I sat, the barcode on my fake swipe card was scanned. When it registered an error, I had to charm the exam invigilator to take a lenient attitude." Our final question was to ask how much Sir DeVille charges for his extraordinary services. He just looked us up and down and laughed.
Many students are too poor to afford the services offered by Stan's Exams they have to rely on more primitive methods. According to a report to be published in the Times tomorrow, the two most common exam cheating methods used by Imperial students are "Toilet Breaks" and "Non-linguistic Communication". The "Non-linguistic Communication" method mentioned in the report details attempts made by students to use Morse code, binary code and semaphore to pass answers and information around the exam room. Common signalling methods include coughing, table-tapping and tribal tongue-clicking. One attempt was made to use the specialist Hamley's teddy-bear "Semaphore Sam" to communicate circuit diagrams in an electronic engineering exam. The bears were brought into the exam under the guise of mascots, but the alarm was raised when an invigilator and part-time Navy reservist watched the four-inch flags and correctly decoded the message.
Not all cheating, however, is deliberate. Millstone Water, a Scottish based soft-drinks firm has released a new brand of water called "Liquid Learning". The bottle label is packed with scientific formulae, historical dates and passages from great works of literature. Intended as a revision aid, the new product has caused many students to be removed from exams and expelled from their courses for "possessing prohibited academic material during the exam sessions". Millstone Water is rethinking its product strategy and considering withdrawing its "Revision-aid Lemonade". This has not stopped other manufacturers jumping on the revision-aid bandwagon with the appearance of the Maths Mars bar, Smart Smarties, cheesy corn-based snack "Swotsits" and the difficult to read Cadbury's Crème Egg-heads.
