NCEA cheats …

About 300 students cheated in their NCEAs last year. Apparently that’s bad but surely they can make it positive and give some credits for it – ‘the student can solve problems in a creative or collaborative manner’ or ‘the student can use small technology in his or her pocket to overcome socio-cultural obstacles’ or ‘the student can draw anatomically correct stick-people and apply them to the current economic crisis’.

Of the 300 who cheated, 60 or so had their grades ‘withheld’, which sounds a lot like 80 per cent of the cheats were let off with a smack. No, I don’t mean a literal smack, of course, I meant a slap in the face with a wet National Certificate, which is a figure of speech not an act of physical violence which would be as evil as eating meat or smoking a cigarette.

‘Withheld’ doesn’t mean fail of course or that the assessments were nullified or chucked in the rubbish. ‘Withheld’ sounds more like, ‘delayed’, as in ‘we’ll give them to you later sonny, when the hoo ha has died down’.

And um, is cheating in NCEA at all like saying you have a PhD when you don’t, but you thought you did? I’m wondering how anyone can make that mistake? Um, I think I have a Commerce Degree but it might be Trade Cert in Telephone Repairs, no wait, now that I think really hard, it just might be a PhD. I remember writing a really big essay. Maybe I do have a PhD.

Mind you, it’s one thing to have said you have a PhD when you don’t – it’s another to have appointed that person to a very big bossy job without checking the qualifications, and then doing the same thing again. That person must be hiding quietly in an office somewhere.

And is cheating like cutting adult-classes from schools? It sort of isn’t but it’s just as despicable – and silly, because if the facilities are there then how much is going to be saved by shutting them down and can’t we just all agree that education and learning are good things no matter what the cost? The government can save money by culling off a few List MPs and all their hangers on.

Back to the NCEA cheaters, my favourites of whom were the six who drew rude pictures on their exam papers. I assume these weren’t Biology or Art exams because the rude pictures would’ve got some marks. I wonder what (or who) the pictures were of. Let’s all spend this week guessing – just for the fun of it.

— Peter Giddens