Polish education. Time for the tricks to stop

Dishonesty is endemic in Polish education

SITTING among the pigeons of Cracow's market square, six “students” struggle to complete the final high-school exam. One by one, they are caught cheating, and forced to stand up, showing their masks: well-known corrupt politicians and businessmen. This pointed little street drama was organised by Law and Justice, the party that won Poland's recent elections.

The equating of corruption with cheating is a new idea in Poland. People rage over corruption, but mostly see cheating in exams as no more of a moral question than disobeying traffic rules. Cheating equipment is a thriving business. One favourite is a pen that writes in ink visible only under an ultra-violet light (which is cunningly concealed at the end of the pen). So seemingly blank sheets of paper can contain crucial notes. A cruder pen, slightly fatter than normal, contains a long, spring-loaded scroll of paper. Over 9,000 of these were sold in September alone. Educational publishers turn out “revision guides ” - -complete with versions in tiny type, easy to tuck up sleeves or into belts.

And there isn't much moral questioning from the book trade. “It doesn't bother me at all that we sell these booklets. Though if I had children, I wouldn't let them cheat,” says Tatiana Druszcz, a manager at EMPiK, a Warsaw bookstore.

Cheating is entrenched in Polish educational culture, far more than in other post-communist countries. One reason is general admiration for all forms of dissent, ingrained in a society with long memories of foreign-imposed rule. But those days are gone. Cheating looks out of place in a country that prides itself on high educational standards. The authorities have been moving in the right direction by overhauling the high-school final exam. High grades in that test used to translate into perks for teachers, with predictable results. This year, for the first time, core subjects were graded externally, with visiting teachers present in the exam rooms. The education ministry said students caught cheating would fail - though they could resit the exam later.

But the real sign of change could be linguistic. The word for cheating - sciaganie - suggests ingenuity, not dishonesty. Only when Poles find a more pejorative term will this dubious habit lose its moral immunity.