Buying your way to success

Celebrations: But not everyone's as honest as these

News that A-level exam papers have been on sale to cheats for £400 has shocked many people. But it may go deeper than that, says BBC News Online's Chris Horrie.

Writing answers on your cuff, smuggling crib notes into the toilet, attempting telepathy ... all tactics used by desperate schoolboys down the ages to cheat in their exams.

The £400 exam paper may however be only the latest symptom of a "results culture" where students will do anything to get the grades they want.

According to some, the rot sets in early with school students and their parents engaging "personal tutors" outside school hours to buy themselves an advantage.

It is the epitome of what has happened to education

University lecturers' spokesperson

Tutors may encourage pupils to gain a deeper understanding of their subject, but parents paying fees of up to £20 an hour, will expect to have their offspring drilled and trained in the art of getting high grades in exams - which is not always the same thing.

The attempted A-level maths fraud came to light when a school student presented the exam paper to a private tutor - who immediately blew the whistle.

Grooming

The National Union of Teachers says the use of tutors is a matter of parental choice.

But it says many teachers are concerned that the emphasis on league tables has promoted "teaching to the test" - meaning the process of grooming pupils to do well in exams - rather than mastering a subject.

You'll never get stuck in the library after hours again

Promise on a leading internet exam "cheat" site

But the move to coursework - when combined with the growing pressure on schools to see their pupils get high grades - has opened up new opportunities for forms of cheating.

Higher Grades

A teacher at a school in Bristol was recently sacked after it was claimed he helped pupils complete coursework and gain higher grades. A French teacher resigned from Prince William's former school after helping boys during a GCSE exam.

Two years ago retired senior languages examiner Gordon Lloyd claimed in a book that teachers helped students, especially in oral exams, to get higher grades by telling them what to say before recordings were made for examination purposes.

Answers can sometimes be given off the cuff

"Cases have been reported to the boards, and proved, where a teacher has collected and marked a completed piece of course work and has handed it back to the candidates with instructions to rewrite it incorporating all the corrections and suggested amendments," Mr Lloyd wrote.

The practice of parents "boosting" their school student offspring's grades by helping with coursework is impossible to detect, but may be taking place on a vast scale. Some university lecturers say A-level results are no longer a reliable guide to an applicants' knowledge or ability.

And the signs are that once students get into university the opportunities for cheating and other forms of "grade-boosting" multiply thanks in part to the internet.

"Mass cheating"

Several websites offer ready-made coursework ready to be downloaded and handed in. Some even offer to tailor the work to fit past records of grades, so the cheating will be harder to spot.

In 1999, more than 100 computer science students at the University of Edinburgh had their marks reduced after what was dubbed "mass cheating" in the production of practical coursework using the internet.

Would-be cheats and university authorities are now introducing special "plagiarism-spotting" computer software designed to identify the source of unoriginal work. After the system's introduction at one leading American university last month 120 students on a single course were found to have used internet "cheat" sites.

A spokesperson for the lecturers' union Natfhe says that cheating has become "part of the culture of results" where there is "massive pressure" on students as well as teachers and lecturers to produce lists of "ever-improving results to include in league tables".

"Looked at in the round, the business of selling an exam paper on the street for money is the epitome of what has happened to parts of the education system.

"It is not surprising to see these abuses spreading - it is all part of the process of marketisation, which concentrates on competition between institutions rather than core educational values."