Dear Cheaters

[RN9742]

Open letter to cheaters:

If you think you are not harming anyone by your actions, you are wrong. You are very likely hurting not only yourself, and cheating yourself out of becoming the best nurse you can be, you are also harming your entire class, and very likely those who follow behind you. The consequences of cheating do affect the entire class, especially those students who put as much effort into studying for an exam, as you do figuring out a supposed easy way to pass. It creates an atmosphere on exam days that is hostile, which increases the anxiety of the entire class, and is especially harmful to those who already have test anxiety. The increase in anxiety causes those who studied hard to not perform as well as usual, or even improve significantly due to fear of being labeled a cheater. It also punishes those who worked hard, but are no longer allowed to learn from their mistakes due to not longer being able to review exams.

Basically cheaters suck, and it sucks being punished for the actions of another!

Signed,

Frustrated Nursing Student who is working her bum off to become a great nurse!

[Stephalump]

Our program must be a lot harder to cheat in.

Yeah. Other than people giving each other homework answers, it's nearly impossible to cheat in my program without going to some pretty big extremes (like buying answers from god knows who.) Our tests are computerized, the questions are random (never the same as the person next to you), you can't go back once you've answered a question, and we're divided into small groups and proctored. It would be really tough to cheat!

[CEO101]

I think a lot of students would be less likely to cheat if nursing schools didnt make it so difficult, thats not an excuse or anything however. In my nursing school I recall third semester like 75% of the entire class was held back, only a few of us made it to fourth semester which had a bunch of repeat students too who had to take the course again after failing or getting caught cheating

basically some one "snitched" about a whole bunch of students having old exams, after that it became so hard on every one else, the professors really had a hard time trusting any of us

[amoLucia]

To OP and all the posters out there - cheaters have always existed and in all fields. There's probably a few out there NOW reading this thread and are ROFLAO. An they're thinking yadda, yadda, yadda. Sad but true.

Having been an instructor, it is all but next to impossible to catch cheaters. It just can't be hearsay, so any measures taken affect all - even the honest students. Just when academic top honchos think they've built a better mousetrap, along come smarter rats (cheaters)!!!

I don't know when the karmic payback catches up because nsg school cheaters DO become licensed nurses and they do float along in the workplace environment. You'll know them when you work with them after a while. Their behaviors will be similar to those in school.

You can only be responsible for yourself and avoid them. You are the better person and the better nurse (to be).

[Kittythestudentnurse]

This was my thought too... we can't have anything in front of us, not a glass of water - nothing! calculators must be ones provided by the college. We can have a pencil (2) and a highlighter. we have to sit e/o space. Bags have to be at the back of the room, no coats on the chairs... how would one even cheat in that situation? (rhetorical question)

You actually get to use your own pencil??? We don't even get to do that!!! The only thing we can bring is our student id. We're not even allowed to wear hoodies to tests. Cheaters suck.

[sjalv]

Why is the entire class being punished for something a few people are doing? In our school, if someone is caught cheating, they're expelled no questions asked. I don't see what other, uninvolved students have to do with it.

I don't see how anyone would cheat anyway. All of our testing is done through blackboard in a computer lab. There are usually 2-3 instructors in the room monitoring us, there are dividers between the computers, and the question order is scrambled for everyone. It would be really hard to successfully cheat.

[PurpleLover]

This happened to me in my BIO 211 class. The whole class was punished for the actions of 4 people.

Sent from my iPhone using allnurses.com

[smf0903]

The biggest thing I see is classes where there are two or more separate sections. So one section takes the test on say, Tuesday, and the next section takes the test on Thursday. "Don't talk to any of your classmates who are in Thursday's section," the instructors say. Are you kidding me? I hear people talking about questions and answers in the halls all the time.[/quote']

This is what happens at our school...and it blows my mind. Last semester an instructor was in the hall as this was going down and she punished the everyone taking that class that semester...every lecture that had a test that week was punished. What blows my mind is this: if I was first lecture group to take the exam, why would I tell the next group what's on it so that they know exactly what to study, as opposed to me, who studied EVERYTHING because I didn't know what was going to be on it? No thankyouverymuch! LOL We had a guy in our first A&P who would follow me around and copy my answers (we had models set up in the lab with arrows pointing at the parts). I put the kabosh on that by walking around once and putting wrong answers, then after he turned his paper in I walked back around and put in the right ones. It took 2 exams for him to figure it out, and it stopped. But as far as cheating during exams now, only way to cheat is to discuss exam after it was taken...

[fetch, BSN, RN]

In my school some industrious cheater googled our textbook and found the online teacher version. They then purchased it for a fairly low price, copied all the test banks, and distributed to their besties. We have very small class sizes, so before long most of the class had it. I only found out when I and two other students tried to protest a test question - the test was on 4 chapters of material (easily 100 pages of reading) and this particular answer was only mentioned once in the caption to a picture. It wasn't even alluded to in any of the other parts of the reading, the teacher never mentioned it or discussed the disease process in the question, it was the "weird" medication that didn't follow the trends of all other medications discussed, etc. The three of us were totally bewildered how 15 other classmates knew to study this one picture on this one page well enough to instantly know the correct answer -- yet when we asked them to show us the information in the book, it took almost 30 minutes for ANY of them to find the right page. They all knew because they had the test bank and just memorized all the right answers, they didn't study the material at all!

I was so mad when I found out that I started crying right in class. This particular teacher was AWFUL - she'd never been trained as a teacher, so her idea of "teaching" was just reading half of the book-provided powerpoints out to us, then making us read the rest of it at home. If anyone asked a question, she would just read out whatever the book said that related to that topic. She never gave us any real-world information, never expanded on ideas in the book, never actually TAUGHT anything. But because the majority of the class cheated for every test, the administration thought there was nothing wrong with how she ran her class. Most of the students wee passing right? Clearly the three of us who were failing miserably - after nearly two years of good grades, because did I mention this was the second to last class of the program? - well we were clearly just not studying hard enough.

I ended up failing that class, having to sit out two months and then return to re-take it at the same time all the cheaters graduated. That was two years ago - still bitter!

[NickiLaughs, ADN, BSN, RN]

I recall in nursing school for my LVN program a long time ago, these two girls were notorious for cheating on tests. I wanted to say something, I did to their face eventually out of class. I told them they were screwing themselves regarding their careers and the rest of the class on averages for grades. They smirked.

6 months later, I'm shopping with my big paycheck as a nurse, I see one of them working at forever 21. Turns out she failed nclex twice. I smirked.

Your diligence will pay off. Teachers will notice, opportunities of better internships because of your hard work will happen. Sometimes not quick like you would like. But it will. :). Be strong!

[NutmeggeRN, BSN]

I think a lot of students would be less likely to cheat if nursing schools didnt make it so difficult, thats not an excuse or anything however.

Seriously?

[nekozuki, LPN]

Lol, cheaters keep me in business. I tutor LPNs doing A&PI/II to try and get into RN transition programs, and without fail, if they went to one particular for-profit school (that shall remain nameless), they know NOTHING. Everyone just went online and shared test bank answers, and as a result, they can't keep up with the basic RN pre-reqs at the community college level. Still, it scares me that one lady I tutor is working at a busy hospital on a cardiac floor, but can't even trace blood flow through the heart.

I'm pretty much a live-and-let-live kind of dude and I always seek to master the material before me. The lazy people have always adversely affected the learning environment - by cheating, by copying posted solutions so that the teacher refuses to post them until after they're due, etc - but there's nothing I can do about them.

I refuse to let them suck any bit of energy out of me. If the teacher cares enough to bust them, great... if they care enough to let them fail, great... if not, I will still excel.

(And I used to be a cheater long, long ago but eventually realized that I was a better student than a cheater and a better student than the people off of whom I cheated.)