The Daily Record

Frederick Othman

WASHINGTON. - When I went to school, Washington University, St. Louis, class of 1926, there was no such thing as an honor system. Examinations were a battle of wits between professors and their students.

Anybody who could cheat under our system was a minor genius, unusually nimble of brain, and destined to become at least a brigadier general. Mostly we never got away with our plots to undermine the authorities, although I must admit I did manage for two years running to give the business to Doc Batista, the professor of Spanish literature.

So for the benefit of the brass-bound pedagogues at West Point, who now are figuring on how to reorganize their scholastic scheme, I'd like to report how we used to do it on those tense June days in St. Louis.

The whole class filed into the examination hall, with ink, pens, and stacks of blank, blue-bound books in which to answer the question. Anything else was verboten and bulges under coats got the old double-0. The professor always was on hand; so were a couple or three of his assistants to stalk down the aisles like traffic cops.

Getting signals from outside was no good, because the proctors kept an eye on the windows against loiterers. A fellow couldn't crib from a pony because he couldn't get a book, no matter how slim, inside.

One of my brighter schoolmates thought up what looked like a magnificent idea for the exam in medieval European history. With magnifying glass and fine-pointed camel's hair brush he painted on his fingernails in script too small to see with the naked eye all the more important names and dates on which he expected to be quizzed. The rest of us admired him vastly.

He would have gotten away with it, too, except that once he entered the hall he did not dare examine his fingers with a microscope. He wiped off the ink with a sweaty handkerchief and took that exam honestly.

He'd used so much mental energy writing down all that information in size to fit on the head of a pin that all the facts stuck in his head. Made an A for the course and if he hadn't tried to cheat he'd probably have flunked it.

That brings us to Prof. Batista. He was a nice little guy and he certainly did know his Spanish, but his idea of an examination was for his students to translate a few chapters of an English novel into the flowery prose of the caballeros.

I soon noticed that those students who filled the most pages with Spanish got the best grades. The professor obviously believed in volume.

I also came to the conclusion that no man, no matter how conscientious, could read all that guff. With this thought in mind I always translated carefully the first couple or three pages of a blue book, scribbled anything at all, including doodles, in the middle section, and resumed Spanish again on the last couple of pages. This worked as I had hoped.

The professor only glanced at the first page or two of an examination book. I followed this labor-saving device for my last two years and the doc never did catch on. This bucked me up considerably. Somehow I never did figure that I was cheating and somehow I managed to learn the language.

And if West Point needs any more hints on how to educate the young, without honor systems or scandals, either, I'm available to the pedagogical colonels any afternoon at two.

(Copyright, 1951, by United Feature Syndicate, Inc.)