Here is a video of the Ending of the movie Stand and Deliver.
Ten of the 1982 students signed waivers to allow the College Board to show their exams to Jay Mathews, the author of Escalante: The Best Teacher in America. Mathews found that nine of them had made "identical silly mistakes" on free response question six. Mathews heard from two of the students that during the exam, a piece of paper had been passed around with that flawed solution. Twelve students, including the nine with the identical mistakes, retook the exam, and most of them received the top scores of four and five. Mathews concluded that nine of the students did cheat, but they knew the material and did not need to.
I don't think this is in the movie, which frames the suspicion of cheating as completely unfounded racism and classism. I'm a tad annoyed to learn so many years later that at least some did cheat, because probably most people are like me and primarily know the story from the movie and the story in the movie implicitly reinforces the idea that racism is alive and well and insidious and inescapable and this likely actively undermines a goal of some kind of equality by actively encouraging minorities to assume the worst and assume you can't get anywhere on merit and will be unfairly gatekept out based on racism, sexism etc.
I'm the highest ranked woman on Hacker News because I defaulted to assuming that girl bits in your pants isn't per se why there were very few women on the site at all and none on the leaderboard for years. It is a disservice to all minorities to promote the inaccurate narrative in the movie and promote the idea that racism and classism were the root cause of the suspicion of cheating and not the truth that there was objective evidence of cheating on the majority of tests from students from that school that year which triggered the completely reasonable investigation.
I don't know why they cheated. Maybe they felt they "had to" for some reason.
There is a 1983 movie called Class and the Wikipedia article doesn't really explain the plot particularly well. Jonathan is a smart kid there on a merit scholarship and his roommate Skip is from a very wealthy family.
It is eventually revealed that Jonathan cheated on the SAT, a college entrance exam. Skip is like "But WHY? You're actually SMART!" and Jonathan says something like because he's from a poor family and he's there at this elite prep school on scholarship, so he HAD to be sure he scored well enough.
My recollection is that it's called Class for myriad reasons, including being about the group of kids in the senior class of this prep school and being about friction between roommates of different social classes.
But ultimately it refers to Skip not ratting his friend out when there is an investigation regarding stolen SAT tests even though Skip knows his friend cheated and even though it has been revealed that when Skip sent Jonathan to Chicago with a hundred dollar and a mission to lose his virginity, Jonathan ended up in bed with Skip's mother having absolutely no idea at the time that it was Skip's mother.
Here are two pertinent clips from the movie:
I don't really understand why anyone would cheat academically. I don't believe I have ever cheated on a test or plagiarized a paper.
In one of my college classes, the teacher announced we would be cutting something out of the planned curriculum because there just wasn't enough time to cover it all. I was an older student and most of my classmates were substantially younger than me.
They all cheered and were like "Yes! Cool! Cut more! That works for us!" I was the buzzing who was like "What if you actually need to know that stuff for a future class or a job??"
Yeah, no one liked me.
Education is about learning something. People who cheat on tests or plagiarize papers want the credential because it potentially has substantial monetary value but don't actually value learning and understanding something.
Teaching to the test can be actively harmful to a good education and actively undermine the educational process. Testing by some means is necessary for credentialing and for trying to figure out if someone is genuinely qualified to do a particular job, but can be gamed or cheated on and sometimes fails for other reasons, such as some people suffer debilitating test-taking anxiety.
I had high SAT scores in high school and so-so grades, in part because of an unidentified medical condition. My college performance was more in line with my test scores because having more control over my schedule and diet substantially enhanced my performance, though for most students the way to bet is that past grades are a stronger predictor of grades than test scores.
My sister once told me that her extremely high SAT score was due to making pretty patterns on the answer sheet. She suggested to me that she had taken the test so many times she must have subconsciously picked up on something.
At the same time, she liked to pretend she was smarter than me and more competitive, in part because of her completely meaningless higher SAT score based on making pretty patterns without bothering to read the questions.
My sister accepted her National Merit Scholarship to UGA and I declined mine. She ended up with important credentials I lack and that is a factor that helped foster a career that I lack.
I wouldn't trade my life for hers. She's had cancer like five times that I know of. Her medical history makes mine look tame in comparison and her two marriages were nothing I envy.
If you aren't good at the credentials game, starting your own business may be the better path.
Business owners need to actually deliver if they want paying customers. Being able to play the game with a big bureaucracy for a government paycheck doesn't per se qualify you to make something people want and are willing to say "Shut up and take my money!" about.
If you think "I won't be promoted anyway because of the color of my skin," I encourage to value education -- learning something -- over credentials. The king's stamp doesn't make the gold good anyway.
Perhaps people cheat because they value the credentials more than actually learning something. I absolutely don't understand that because that tends to come back to bite you.
If the truth comes out -- and you should assume that it will and that it's a question of when not if -- the consequences can be extremely serious. The longer it takes, the more damage it likely does.
To you because one thing leads to another and the lies told to cover up the first lie typically grow and the dirty deeds get steadily dirtier with each step, as covered in a post I wrote elsewhere.