Test Swindlers
What’s worse: an attendance strike or a failed test? To a growing number of Ramaz students, it’s a failed test. More than ever, freshman, sophomores, juniors, and even seniors have taken up the practice of arriving to school late on days when they have AM tests. Although Preludes clearly forbids tapping in late on a test day, these sneaky students use the morning to prepare for their exams and then slip into school just in time to take them. While teachers are letting it go, their classmates are noticing. Or even worse than coming late, they don’t show up at all, and then take the test days later as a makeup—using the extra time to study. Some of these test-dodgers will go so far as miss all their classes for a few days just to give themselves extra time to study.
Every Ramaz student knows at least one kid who fits this description; they exist in every grade and every track. The irony is that many of them are the kids in the class who need the additional study time the least.
Even more sly than the test-dodgers are the test-hagglers. These are the students who pre-negotiate a later test date with teachers beforehand, often citing play practices, family events, or current sickness, even though they somehow make it to school on the test date. As a Ramaz student, one finds it difficult to keep track of the outrageous test-dodging scams one’s classmates concoct.
This begs a modified form of the original question. What’s worse: a bad grade, or having everyone jealous of you (in a negative sense) for cheating the test system? The test-dodgers can be unpopular, disliked and the butt of jokes because of their actions.
When, exactly, are these makeups taking place? They are supposed to happen after school a couple of days following the scheduled test, when students and teachers come to a mutually convenient date. However, in some outrageous cases, students do not take their makeups until as much as a month after the initial exam date. This affects not only them but their classmates as as well. Teachers do not give back the exam to the rest of the class until the dodger has gotten around to squeezing the test makeup into their busy schedule of post-doctor-checkups, post-bar mitzvah bar mitzvah events, and Sheva Brachot after the weddings.
There needs to be a solution to this situations which creates an even playing field for all Ramaz students, lest the students with real health issues become the victims of these endless ploys. This is the Ramaz version of the boy who cried wolf, except this time, it’s the student who cried, “I’m so busy, can I please have a couple more days to prepare!?”
