Sweat rolled down "Stephen's" neck as the echo of footsteps in an auditorium announced a proctor's approach.
He thought he'd been collared when the footsteps halted beside his desk.
Soon, however, the proctor moved on and Stephen continued whispering answers to a fellow examinee.
Stephen, now a math teacher in Taichung, said: "I was very nervous," while recalling how he had helped his student cheat on a key high school math test eight years ago.
Test administrators didn't bat an eyelid when Stephen -- then a master's student of engineering in his mid-20s at National Taiwan University (NTU) -- had registered for a high school exam and took the test in a hall full of 17-year-olds, he said.
"Nobody cared," he said.
In roughly 30 minutes, Stephen finished the test and then relayed his answers to a pupil who he had been tutoring -- a high school student who stood little chance of acing the exam on his own.
The two were seated next to each other because they had signed up for the test together, Stephen said.
In a country where cheating on tests is common and often performed with the help of cutting-edge technology, cheaters like Stephen are smalltime.
The pros, he said, use scanner pens and earpieces, relying on electronic signals to transmit information in and out of testing sites.
Although far fewer than their more conventional counterparts, such tech-savvy cheaters sometimes deal disproportionately powerful blows to the education system, he said.
In 2004, for instance, computer hackers in China forced the world's leading test developer, New Jersey-based Educational Testing Services (ETS), to scrap its computerized version of the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) on both sides of the Taiwan Strait after they raided ETS' database and poached sensitive information, said Joe Harwood, an English proficiency test developer in Taipei.
Earlier this month, Taiwan's Language Training and Testing Center, which administers the GRE in Taiwan, announced it would begin administering radically revised GREs in September because of security concerns.
ETS likely had both smalltime cheaters and heavyweights boasting spy gadgets and hacking know-how in mind when it overhauled its GRE.
The ETS Web site now mentions updated security features and less memorizable test content.
But try as test administrators might to prevent cheating, the problem is unlikely to go away, education experts said.
A deep-rooted education system that determines academic success based on test performance is behind the rampant cheating, said Taiwan Solidarity Union Legislator Lin Jih-jia (
Cheating is more severe here than in the West because Taiwanese students have only their test scores to rely on in the admission process, while admission to Western schools is based on diversified criteria, Lin said.
"With tests deciding one's future, one is likely to cook up ways -- both legitimate and illegitimate -- to ace them," he said.
For NTU sociology professor Lee Ming-tsung (
Amid a surge of identity theft and phone scam cases in recent years, cheating is a reflection in academia of a broader social problem involving a distorted value system emphasizing results, not the means, he said.
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