Using A Crib

Press, Volume XCVII, Issue 28559, 12 April 1958, Page 3

Using A Crib

(From “The Times."] i According to a recent survey, cheating at examinations is resorted to by nearly half the university students in the United States. Old-fashioned cribbing is it seems, the most popular forn< but in step with the modern fashion of disguising old, uppleasing things under new, misleading terms, it is not called anything as crude as that. Thus, if report is correct, the practice of cheating is known at the University of Southern California as ‘‘the good neighbour policy;” a bland euphemism which in itself earns marks; Georgia Technical plumos for “the wandering eye,” which, with its suggestion of Peeping Tom, is not so haopy an inspiration; while the University of Washington contents itself with “collaboration,” a word of dubious meaning and repute. Time marches on in this as in" other matters, and at one Californian college electronics were called in to help in the age-old game of hoodwinking the examiners—a tiny tape-recording of essential facts was inserted into a fake hearing aid. This is indeed an advance on the conventional device of preparing notes on tiny slips of paper and fitting them into the back of a watch, and. if a committee were to be set up to inquire into the ethics of cribbing as a whole, this new technique might well find itself banned as are too ingenious golf <*lubs by the golfing authorities. For cribbing, strange as it may seem, has—or had—its own moral code, one that does not concern itself solely with methods. The amateur cribber would scorn to crib for a prize or. indeed, to secure an advantage at the expense of others. When Mansell, in Mr Alec Waugh’s “Loom of Youth,” cheated too successfully and won a prize he was anything but pleased and he was speaking for his type when he exclaimed. “But it doesn’t seem quite fair and I’m damned if I want this book.” The Mansells of this world crib—or used to—to save themselves trouble and to keep out of it. The palm, even without the dust, does not come into their scheme of things; al] they want is a quiet life, and if they can get it with some help from the backs of their watches, they will risk the consequences. The professional cribber, the crooked pothunter of the academic ytorld. is a rare, and different, bird. With adults, however, it is the neglect of a crib that is reprehensible. a of slackness and indifference. The sending of a letter with a mis-snelled word as the result of a failure to consult that arch-crib the dictionary: the adding up of a sum, unchecked bv the help of a readv reckoner the misquoting of a famous passage owing to a lazv refusal to consult the original—these are the sins of the schoolboy in reverse It is fortunate that the punish ment is not so painful for us as for him.