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How is it even possible to cheat on a musical performance practical
exam?

[png]

Raymond Chen

May 1st, 20232 1

   

The wife of one of my relatives is a classical pianist. Her father
convinced her to get her undergraduate degree in music teaching,
rather than music performance, so she would have a fallback career in
case the performance thing didn't pan out.

Although it was a teaching university, they did have performance
classes. For one of her piano performance classes, the midterm
examination was a practical exam in three parts.

 1. The examiners choose a key at random by pulling a slip of paper
    from a hat, and the student plays scales and arpeggios in that
    key.
 2. The student plays a short prepared piece.
 3. The student plays a long prepared piece.

My friend happened to be the first student on the exam schedule. She
went into the examination room, played the scales and arpeggios in
the requested key, and then played her short piece and her long
piece. After she was done, the examiners asked her if she could stick
around and help with administering the remainder of the exams:
Checking that the correct student shows up, pulling the slips of
paper, timekeeping, and performing other administrative tasks. She
didn't have anything important planned for the rest of the afternoon,
so she agreed.

The second student came into the examination room. Upon seeing that
my friend was assisting, the student panicked and asked for a few
moments to calm down.

After a brief break, the examination began. My friend pulled a slip
of paper from the hat and announced "E flat major". The student
played an E flat major scale rather clumsily and was still a little
rattled for the performance of the short piece and the long piece.

A similar pattern repeated itself for the other students. There was a
moment of panic (some students panicked more than others), a nervous
set of scales and arpeggios, and then depending on how quickly the
student calmed down, the short and long pieces ranged from shaky to
solid.

Later, one of the students in the class explained to my friend what
happened.

Apparently, all of the other students in the class had conspired to
cheat on the exam. They knew from talking with students who had taken
the class in the past that the examiners would ask the first student
to stick around and be responsible for pulling the slips of paper.
The students had decided among themselves who would practice which
key's scales and arpeggios, and their plan was that whichever student
was chosen to be the paper-slip-picker would ignore the instructions
on the paper and just announce the key that the examinee had
practiced.1

When each student saw that my friend was the exam assistant, they
realized that their plan had fallen apart, and they would most likely
be asked to play scales and arpeggios in a key that they hadn't
practiced.

The student explained why they created a cheating pact: "If we had to
practice all 24 keys, then we wouldn't have time for partying and
dating! We didn't include you because it's clear that you wouldn't be
interested, seeing as you make no effort to look pretty."2

1 The students didn't even distribute the keys among themselves in a
plausible manner. Each student chose an easy key to practice, so
there were a lot of F majors and E minors, but no B flat minors or B
majors. Somehow they didn't think this would raise suspicion. But I
guess that's sort of to be expected: The students who are prone to
cheating aren't the smart ones.3

2 I don't know what lofty standards the other students have for
beauty. I think most people would consider my relative's wife to be
within the conventional bounds of attractiveness.

3 The irony was not lost on me that these cheating students were
working toward a teaching degree.

[png]

Raymond Chen

Follow    

Tagged Non-Computer

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2 comments

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  * [png]
    Antonio Rodriguez May 1, 2023 11:04 am  0
    collapse this comment copy link to this comment
   
    That future teachers don't realize the implications of trying to
    cheat themselves is, maybe, the best proof of the level of
    "smartity" of the students  .

    Also, when you spend more time partying or preparing to party,
    you end being more aware of the other's appearance and how much
    effort they put on that. After graduating from college, I started
    giving private classes to other students from my faculty. Some of
    my pupils had started the degree two or three years before me,
    yet they still had some dangling subjects. I suspect, given their
    level of practice, that their true degree wasn't Computer
    Science, but Partiology.

    Log in to Vote or Reply
  * [png]
    Dave Gzorple May 2, 2023 10:16 pm  0
    collapse this comment copy link to this comment
   
    Is it just me or is getting a random student to pick the exam
    questions that other random students have to answer a bit like
    building an SQL query with string concatenation? It's not a case
    of "if this will be abused" but merely "when will this be
    abused".

    Log in to Vote or Reply

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