indianotes

The recent NEET controversy and student agitation has once again pushed exam cheating into the spotlight. This is not a new, but recurring phenomenon, spanning several decades.

What was once limited to students sneaking in chits, evolved into mass scale copying assisted by teachers and officials. This culminated in 2015 with the infamous images of parents climbing school walls in Bihar. Since then, technology, large scale impersonation, organized gangs and collusion between teachers, parents and officials have only magnified the problem. NEET is only the latest in a long list of compromised entrance, recruitment and school examinations.

This begs the question – why do we cheat so much?

The usual answer is the high stakes. Seats and jobs are limited. The number of aspirants have grown dramatically, while opportunities have not kept pace. Couple this with poor enforcement and huge incentives for organized criminal rackets, and the result is what we saw in NEET and other exams.

The typical reaction is stricter enforcement and harsher punishment. China also struggled with mass-scale cheating till the early 2000s. They turned their “Gaokao” into a military style operation – papers move in armoured trucks, paper-setters are locked up; and metal detectors, AI surveillance and monitoring of social media are ubiquitous.

Since 2015, China has reportedly prosecuted more than 11,000 people. Large-scale cheating has (apparently) reduced, but not been eliminated. This suggests that the problem is deeper than can be solved by enforcement alone.

Substantial research in behavioral economics, psychology and sociology has found that cheating is not simply a moral failing, but is influenced by prevailing social norms.

People don’t decide to cheat by themselves. They look around and take cues from what they see around them. The reasoning is that if everybody is cheating, then I’d be foolish not to.

Similar behaviour appears in multiple settings – littering, vandalism, breaking traffic rules, ticketless travel or bribery. This idea is closely related to the “Broken Windows” theory, but psychologists later refined it into what Robert Cialdini called “descriptive norms.”

Essentially, people infer what is acceptable by observing others do the same things. When citizens believe that rules are enforced, observe others behaving well and trust institutions; they are less likely to break rules.

The converse is also true. If people think that bribing is common, officials and politicians are corrupt, and contracts are not enforced – they start behaving the same way. This is what is happening in India – we see instances of rule-breaking all around us.

While we all condemn corruption in the abstract, we often view it as understandable, even necessary. And we justify this by saying the system is unfair, or everyone else is doing it.

This should make us pause and think. Exam cheating is not the disease, only the symptom. The larger issue is that our society views rule-breaking as normal, understandable and often necessary.  

If we want clean exams, we need more than metal detectors, CCTV cameras and stricter punishments. We need to create a society where cheating carries not just legal consequences but social disapproval.

And until that happens, we will continue to cheat – and evade taxes, bribe, litter and drive on the wrong side of the road.