Some days when I read the news, I recall what Kundera said about Anna Karenina. Noting the parallel between the opening and ending of the novel, he says that we should not view the symmetry as contrived to serve a fictional purpose. After all, real life carries more surprising symmetries than fiction could ever produce. They lack only a narrator to notice them.
When I read this article about FBI agents cheating on an exam to test their knowledge of the new guidelines for gathering domestic intelligence, I simply had to laugh. Rather emblematic of the entire situation, I think: cops cheating and cutting corners on their knowledge of guidelines that already test the limits of our civil liberties and the Constitution (yes, I’m being polite). What must Kundera think of this? The “lawlessness,” if you will, of our dishonest G-men shucking the exam offers an admirable and rhetorically delectable symmetry with the lawlessness of the very surveillance guidelines that govern the behavior of these very same G-men. If it were not so upsetting, I would find it stylistically beautiful. And funny.
But you know what, it’s the cheating element that is really bugging me. Maybe because I am an educator, or maybe because I’ve been closely following a recent debate about cheating, I don’t know. But it bugs the hell out of me that they cheated.
It was entirely unnecessary. If you read the report, it quickly becomes clear that a “normal” FBI training seminar and test could only be failed if the test-taker were unconscious or dead. A few examples: trainers during a “normal” seminar would (a) stomp their feet loudly several times when covering material related to an exam question, (b) use “cartoon characters” on PowerPoint slides to indicate exam material, or (c) use some other attention-getting signal (raised eyebrows and finger pointing?) to tell people that this next thing would definitely be on the exam.
And the “normal” exam? Easy mode. You could change your answer after it was selected. Or, if you actually managed to get one wrong, you were told immediately that it was wrong, so you wouldn’t forget on the re-test (yes…re-test). Oh, and there was no randomizing of questions, answers, or ordering. Right answers were always the same, and always in the same order on the test.
Hilarious. If I ran my classes like the FBI runs its training programs, I would be laughed out of my University and then fired. Now, the DIOG exam they cheated on in large numbers was apparently harder than the normal exam because, as best as I can tell, it employed common sense. Randomized questions, randomized answer selection, and you could not revisit or change answers once selected. You also did not know which you answered right or wrong, only a total score. Gee, sounds almost like a normal test…oh, and the last question was an acceptance of an honor pledge that you only consulted authorized material for the exam and didn’t talk to or receive support from another person. So far, so good.
And to make things easier than most freshmen level college courses, there was no penalty for failing except “remedial training” (which almost never happened) and a re-test. It was an open-book test, zero time limit, and infinite re-tests upon failing. No penalties, no fouls. Just test till you passed.
Oh, I um forgot to mention: it was possible to download and print all 51 questions once you opened the exam. It seems this was a brief oversight on the part of the test makers, but well, a bunch of lawyers told employees they could print the exam, so they did. And then passed. But you know, they weren’t supposed to because, well, read for yourself:
If ever asked, the CPO would not have authorized the printing of
the DIOG test questions to be shared with employees prior to them
taking the DIOG test. Even though the DIOG and notes were
authorized during test taking, it was never the intent of the CPO to
have copies of the test questions available outside of actually
taking the Virtual Academy DIOG test.
Why this would not constitute common sense and the most obvious course of action to even a reasonably educated cop, much less an FBI agent, is utterly mystifying. Have you watched Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? You can’t get the questions in advance and then come back to answer them all correctly and take the money! C’mon. Even fifth-graders know this. Why don’t the G-men and their lawyers?
But alright. Exams, even this “more rigorous” exam, are impossible to fail at the FBI. So why cheat? It couldn’t be easier to pass. It’s fail-proof! Why cheat on a test you can’t, in the end, fail? That’s what is bugging me. Cheating on an exam when it is entirely unnecessary and nothing – except our civil liberties – hangs in the balance.
When I have a student that cheats, both the reaction and the reasons are the same. It is always sad. Sometimes, they were overworked, waited till the last minute, or had too many exams that day/week/month. Other times, they thought they had a full-proof method, they didn’t realize the severity of what they were doing, or they didn’t know what they were doing. In the end, the reasons amount to the same thing. It didn’t matter.
I suspect that is why they always expected, wrongly, that I would just let them re-take the assignment with a slight penalty…give them a do-over, a mulligan. Ok, they were caught, it was a mistake and a bad thing to do, but in the end, it didn’t matter. Let’s look to the future, not the past. Let’s recognize that people are human and offer a second chance. I am deeply sympathetic to second chances and renewed hope and spirit. I have been given many second chances, and I doubt that I deserved even a fraction of them. I am convinced that generosity is a powerful motivator, and I am absolutely convinced that cheating hurts those who engage in it far more, in the end, than the punishments that I might inflict. Attentive to these recognitions, I have given many second chances. I have tried constructive approaches, and I have done everything I can to teach the value of honesty rather than the punishment for dishonesty.
But I have always been concerned by the perspective that the exam, assignment, or test just didn’t matter. In the larger context, education is no longer its own value, and it is not prized as a good in itself. Students need jobs, and graduates need jobs that will help them pay off the investment of college. As much as education might be about other things, it is also about functional, practical ends. Chief among those ends is a good, well-paying job. Exams are simply hurdles in the way of that final end, grades, and that ultimate end, jobs. They don’t matter. So why not cheat? It’s not a cost benefit analysis, it’s just a recognition that an exam is merely an insignificant means to an end that is disconnected from both the exam and the material it covers. Exams relate to narrow ranges of information that will not, in the grand scheme, impact a life beyond the course grade which in the end contributes to a job. In the midst of this indifference and insignificance, cheating is very nearly mandated.
No, this is not cynicism. No, I am not speaking about all students. Not even about most students. I am instead attempting to locate the range of interests that would lead one to view exams and tests as so insignificant and irrelevant that it is worth cheating even on an exam that you cannot fail. In my experience with students that are less than honest, I have at times suspected the presence of this indifference and insignificance. It troubles me. And when I look at the lengths to which these agents went in order to cheat on a fail-proof exam, I see a powerful indifference to the exam and its necessity. They cheated, as I imagine it, because the exam and the accompanying training just didn’t matter. It was irrelevant to the ends and aims of their jobs (keeping us safe, stopping terrorists, and all of the other things that involve domestic intelligence). It would neither help nor hinder their effective ability to do what they were already doing, and in this context, they viewed cheating as practically mandated.
This frightens me. Not only because of what it says about the mentality of cheating, but because of the impetus for this specific test. The DIOG (Domestic Investigations and Operations Guide) was implemented as “an outgrowth of the FBI’s post-September 11, 2001, transformation from primarily a law enforcement agency to a domestic intelligence agency that focuses on its national security and law enforcement missions.” The FBI is now a domestic intelligence agency. Got that? And as such, the DIOG was created to “ensure that the FBI’s operating rules are consistent with the Bureau’s mission and current operational needs while at the same time protecting the privacy and civil liberties of Americans.” Of course, this led Congress and a few advocacy groups to wonder whether or not the FBI would actually follow these guidelines, and whether they actually cared about protecting privacy and civil liberties. So, the tests were designed to prove that the FBI cared about privacy and all that weepy, liberal constitution stuff, and to provide transparent assurance that the FBI complied with these guidelines instead of, you know, breaking the law.
And it is this test on which all of those G-men cheated…the test designed to ensure compliance with guidelines to safeguard the privacy and civil liberties of Americans. If my argument has merit, that cheating on a fail-proof test indicates the insignificance of the test for actual goals and ends, then this outcome is more than troubling. It’s downright scary. What would have to be the institutional climate of a domestic intelligence agency such that it would be so utterly indifferent to training and compliance with guidelines that protect civil liberties?
The educational form of the argument states that deep indifference (of the kind that would nearly mandate cheating) occurs when the actual goal of the institutional setting (getting a job) is radically divorced from the intended goal (getting an education). Apply this to our current case, and the implication is that the actual goal of the FBI is radically divorced from the intended goal. And moreover, this is true to such an extent that training and testing for the sake of compliance with the protection of civil liberties is insignificant to the point of meaninglessness. I find that scary.
