Yesterday I sat the SFI D course exam. Whilst it was a step up in difficulty from the C course exam it was manageable. The reading comprehension had an article on Kiruna in northern Sweden. Kiruna is famous for being a mining town (mostly iron I think) and the fact that they're going to have to shift the whole centre of town due to massive subsidence. There were also questions about newspaper headlines and which part of a paper they belonged to and some dealing with synonyms.
The listening exercise went much better than I expected, this is probably due to the fact that I've been listening to Klartext (News in simple Swedish) and a few full length documentaries.
The written paper involved sending in a comment to a newspaper about mobile phone use and expressing your opinion on the pros and cons and whether or not it would be possible to ban their use in certain places.
Reflecting on the exam, I was shocked at the sheer quantity and brazenness of cheating at the end of the listening paper. A large number of people were talking and asking each other for answers they didn't have. A guy from my course, who sat behind me, tried to get me to tell him a couple, but I pretended not to hear or understand.
I find it difficult to express my incredulity at both the invigilators and those students who were shamelessly trying to cheat. I was pretty angry with my class mate, for me he showed his true colours and demonstrated that he is an utter idiot. As the exam started we were given a stern warning that anyone who was believed to be cheating would have their paper torn up and they would fail the exam. This threat soon proved empty, partly due to the sheer volume of students exchanging answers. Couldn't they have ripped up at least one person's paper to discourage it?
I have always disliked people who lie or try and cheat their way to things they haven't worked for so this really offended my sensibilities. Sure, they might get a piece of paper that states they have passed a basic proficiency in a language, but is that really going to help them in the long run, when they actually have to use it? Perhaps I'm viewing this idealistically, but I've encountered plenty of people in my professional career who have made up skills and experiences. They normally ended up hopelessly out of their depth, and those of us who have the correct skills and knowledge normally end up working twice as hard to clean up all the mistakes they make. This happened plenty of times to me as a software developer and latterly as a project manager.
One particular colleague was so inept, I'll be able to tell stories about him for the rest of my working life. His chutzpah was simply staggering. A friend of mine, our email sys admin at the company I worked for, found his CV in the dead mail queue of one of our servers. Somehow, it got circulated around the IT department and became the stuff of legend. This person shamelessly claimed that they'd been running an implementation of a major enterprise application that cost the company in excess of six million pounds. In reality, however, this person's role was make sure a particular department (a small one at that) adopted the new software without any problems.
So whilst I hope that cheats never prosper, unfortunately the world is full of optimists, realists always end up carrying the can.
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