The consequence of cheating in Somaliland examination may be hard for our students to understand. Without the ability to see the long-term effects for our students’ education background and even the dignity of our young unrecognized country, our student always feel that benefits of cheating which is good grade outweigh any negative consequence from cheating the examinations.
It is my pleasure to have a chance to explain my Somaliland students, parents, educators, and ministry of education the bad consequence of examination cheating. Cheating the examinations may lower students’ confidence and his/her self respect and if others see you are cheating and asking them help you may lose their respect and trust and even you be despised person among your students.
One of worst thing and most concern for the cheatings the examination is that cheatings isn’t usually one-time thing. Once the doorstep of cheatings is crossed, our students may find it is easier to continue cheatings more and more and to become dishonest in every situation of life. Students who cheat the examination may lose their personal dignity and integrity that is difficult to recall and cheatings may also damage students’ self image.
Students who do frequently cheatings are wasting their time in school. Most learning every student are going to build him/her self and students must learn education concepts so as to become easy for them to prepare for the next lesson. If the students don’t learn the basic concepts of their subjects that may lead them to set themselves either to continue to fail or cheatings. In my days at the University of Hargeisa If you are caught cheating, you could fail that course and even your name will be written in the cheating board and you may gain a bad reputation among your students and even lecturers.
Cheating the examination in any grade may have negative consequence for your future employment. When you are hired by your future employer based on the Idea that you have received good grade in certain subject; you may fail able to solve problems of that job, offer new Ideas or even maintain the workload in that subject area. Students who repeatedly cheat are always losing their ability to think critically. If our students cheat in higher school as we getting information from the latest national examination it is more likely to do the same in the universities and even are more likely to behave dishonest on the jobs as always happens in the government offices where staff betray working hours.
On other hand, there are many ways that we can prevent cheatings including school administrators should try to fight cheatings by settings up internet fire wall in the days of national examination so students can’t exchange the messages through what is up social media that may contain examinations questions and answers.
We can create a school honor code that clearly spells out ethical behavior and defines academic misconduct. One of the most important is to establish specific penalties for those who cheat on exams and even teachers and supervisors who fail to report cheating cases. For my experience of teaching, complicating matters is that school teachers, administrators and supervisors are always reluctant to bring cheaters to administration offices for one reason they fear students to harm them or because they are going that their schools should get a good grades. Another reason there is no government policy penalizes schools whose students cheat and perform poorly on standardized tests by forcing them to replace staff.
Mohamoud Dahir Omar
Education Analyst
Mobile: 0634423327
