Tramposos!

Another one of my favorite misnomers.  Hacer trampas does not mean “to do tramps” as it may imply.  Instead, it means “to cheat”.  This topic is a hard pill for me to swallow.  For the most part, I would consider to have successfully navigated my academic career with a high degree of integrity (senior year physics may have been an exception but I mean, come on.  It was physics.).  Therefore, I hold my peers in the same regard and perhaps even more so, my students (I’ll admit, it is way more fun on this side of the gradebook.).

This week was first time I’ve seen exams administered and I think the word that describes my initial opinion was ‘appalled’.  I’m not sure if I saw a single student finish their exam honestly without cheating.  It was blatant; students were literally helping each other by talking to their neighbors, passing notes, and sneaking peaks at others all under the nose of the professor.  Now I understand that the Nicaraguan school system differs from American schooling in just about every possible way imaginable but this made me upset.  How can these students show zero respect to the professor and break the rules?  This is when truly understanding culture becomes imperative to the success of any foreign project and also to avoid prejudices.  Nicaraguans, especially in the rural communities where I work, place a high importance on collectivism.  Basically, people value the group more than the individual—either everyone succeeds or no one does.  The students were sacrificing their personal recognition (being the only student with an ‘A’) for the benefit of the whole (every student receiving a passing grade) to beat the system (us evil professors).

Or maybe I’m completely wrong and they just never learned the material—it was a physics exam.