At Macquarie University, Sydney, a study revealed a marked increase in students asking for special circumstances to be taken into consideration for final examinations: from 7 per cent of those enroled in 1979 to more than 12 per cent in 1994. Particularly disturbing were the prevailing levels of these requests in business and science subjects such as economics and finance (19 per cent), mathematics, physics and computing (15 per cent), and biology, chemistry and earth sciences (14 per cent). On the other hand, only 5 per cent of those studying law and English asked for special consideration. Each year, more women than men requested special consideration. Moreover, 14 per cent of students aged 30 years or less made requests compared with 7 per cent of older students.

The vast majority of excuses that students offer for poor performance or not turning up at examinations are, of course, genuine (and in some cases so horrific that even reading about them can be distressing). However, we have also encountered a wide range of elaborate and often engagingly humorous stories invented by students, which are breathtaking in their presentation and inventiveness. The range of genuine excuses is also infinite. The dilemma for campus doctors and tutors alike is to sympathetically weed out the genuine excuses from the concocted.

Most of the ailments which beset students at exam time seem to be of a psychological nature, ranging from depression, lethargy, despondency, trauma and emotional instability to a lack of motivation, confusion, inability to focus on matters, anxiety and a general disinterest in life. These symptoms may have no particular foundation, but occasionally the student backs up his or her excuse with a short story to prove its authenticity. Typical of the genre is the narrative in which a relative or close friend plays the villain – for example the sudden arrival of a brother or sister on the scene forcing the student to share a bedroom with someone who has an inclination to snore and play the radio at odd hours.

Invariably, some students feel moved to elaborate further on a tale that seems beyond question. A first-year student lamented that he was unavoidably detained and missed his final exam because his car broke down on the way to the exam. He verified his story with an enthusiastic letter from a friendly mechanic. Encouraged by the success of this charade, he tried the same story on two subsequent occasions with different tutors and at each presented a similar accompanying letter. He was exposed on the third attempt by a chance remark from the tutor to whom he had first told the tale of woe.

A particular favourite of mine came from a student claiming to be unable to read the vital information about an exam that the university had mailed to her: snails had gobbled it up in her mailbox. On another occasion a first-year history student asked for extra time in her exam because for ten years she had used word processors for all of her writing and was now incapable of normal handwriting.

Other tales include just about every conceivable phobia, ranging from a fear of examinations, fear of failure or being in a room full of other students to, impressively, a fear of books, which made entering a library to study somewhat difficult.

One engaging narrative set new standards for originality when a student explained that his parents had recently purchased a small goat farm beyond the city. The grazing area was apparently so thick with undergrowth that the unfortunate animals constantly became covered in annoying burs. Study time, the student explained, was constantly disrupted by demands to remove the offending burs – a task which apparently consumed most of his waking hours when he would normally be studying.

Some subjects are definitely more of a health hazard and contract every conceivable kind of illness. Beyond the usual ones, there is always a predictable array of “aches and pains” in just about every part of the body. On a par with these is an abundance of “upper respiratory tract infections” and “acute gastroenteritis” which are accompanied by a one-day medical certificate. These cases often reach epidemic proportions and some Australian centres of higher education no longer accept as a valid excuse for absence any illness that lasts only one day – usually the day of the final exam. The early evidence is that this tactic has largely eliminated the problem, and not produced the crop of two-day medical certificates that was first feared. In any event, astute doctors will report along the lines: “Mr Smith visited the surgery today and stated he was in considerable pain”. No further comment is given or is necessary.

I could continue at length on the novel ideas that students explore each year, including problems with short-term memory, turning up for an examination several days after it was held, or appearing on exam day with a head swathed in transparently false bandages. One student claimed he was “bedridden and totally asleep” for five days and hence missed the exams: there was no evidence to confirm his story.

I guess that as long as there are examinations there will be inventive students intent on side-stepping the system and foiling the examiners.

Of course, there’s nothing really new about cheating in exams – it’s just that it has reached such a fine art that it’s becoming increasingly difficult to detect. The new electronic era has put some sophisticated gadgetry into the hands of exam candidates. These, together with the creativeness of the students themselves, are leaving examiners gobsmacked.

It is not just a question of deviousness, though. In recent years, the amount of cheating has increased too and, in some Australian universities, it seems to have reached epidemic proportions.

I first became aware that academic cheating may be an international problem in 1991 when I visited 25 universities in Europe and the US during a sabbatical year. At almost every university, colleagues shared my concern about the increase in it but it was difficult to come by any hard evidence. They were willing to admit privately that there was a problem, and that the number caught was probably the tip of the iceberg. No one was willing to provide figures and thus allow their reputation to become tarnished in bad publicity.

I did, however, find a few reports of studies that attempted to quantify the level of cheating in colleges in the US and these reveal a steady increase. In 1980, a paper by the American psychologist John Baird appeared in the journal Psychology in Schools which reported that, in 1941, 23 per cent of a sample of college students admitted to cheating. By 1960, the figure was 38 per cent, and in 1980 75 per cent. A survey last year by two American psychologists, Donald McCabe and Linda Klebe Trevine, found that up to 95 per cent of college students in the US admitted engaging in some form of academic dishonesty.

Given the amount of genius involved, though, it is no longer enough for supervisors to walk around the room making sure that students are not copying from their neighbour and keeping an eye open for stray pieces of paper that might act as crib sheets. Cheating has become a science. The list of techniques is endless, but a few of the more colourful ones may help other lecturers to catch out the cheats.

There is nothing high-tech about signals, but many lecturers are not aware of their use in exams. Movements of the hand can look quite natural to an invigilator but have wonderful meaning for the cheat. Such signals are best used in multiple choice questions where there is a choice of, say, four or five answers and only four or five gestures have to be learnt. For example, scratching the left or right ear, nose, top of head, chin and neck will identify the answer to those in the know, with the only remaining problem being how to communicate the number of the question that this refers to. This can be achieved in a number of ways. The most obvious is to hold the relevant number of fingers, perhaps while rubbing the face or back of neck. This is then followed by the signal for the answer as above.

Another alternative is to have an arrangement of pencils and rubbers on the desk. For example, if the question is number 21, then two pencils are placed together and the third pencil is placed some short distance to the right. A rubber can be used to ‘add five’ to a number, so that the arrangement of one rubber, two pencils, one rubber, and three pencils indicates the number 78. This may require the person copying to be close enough to see the arrangement, but it is surprising how quickly the answers from a good student can be transferred around the exam room.

A more risky business is to arrange for a substitute to sit the exam. This is only possible if the class is relatively large and the person invigilating does not know the students. An economics student in Australia recently revealed that the going rate for a substitute to sit a first-year exam was A $500 (about £250). The chief examiner at one university, however, revealed that some students are substituting for others in an exam ‘as a dare’, with the reward being simply a bottle of alcohol.

Many colleges, wise to this form of deceit, now insist that students place an ID card on the desk during the exam. In Australia, however, there has been at least one instance where a student successfully tinkered with his ID card, replacing his own photo with that of a friend who did the exam for him.

Another old favourite is when a student asks permission to go to the toilet during an examination in order to retrieve information previously hidden in a cubicle. The latest twist, though, involves mobile phones, which are now small enough to fit into a pocket without detection.

A colleague in Sydney told me there had been a spate of students asking to go to the bathroom during their business studies exam. On one occasion, permission was given with the normal proviso that the student was accompanied. When the student took an unduly long time, the supervisor became suspicious and moved closer to the cubicle. The student had a mobile phone in the cubicle and was busily asking the party at the other end how to do the questions.

Technology has also chipped in with electronic calculators and personal organisers to the extent that programmable machines can store almost anything to make life easier during the exam. Obviously, it is easy enough to ban the use in exams of any calculator that stores text on the grounds that even large essays can be stored and retrieved at the press of a button.

That still leaves sophisticated mathemati-cal calculators containing a variety of functions which will, for example, draw any graph and find the value of any definite integral. Many colleges now insist that all stu-dents use the same model of calculator in exams or they set questions in which more advanced models will be of little use. But this still leaves a loophole for the unscrupulous student, who can use the instruction book for concealing notes and information.

There are numerous other ways that students in Australia have found to ‘play the system’. It would be interesting to hear of the experiences of other people and how other countries deal with the problem.

It is probably fair to say that cheating is impossible to stamp out. The best we can hope for is that the examiners and invigilators stay one step ahead of the cheats and go in for damage limitation. One thing is certain, cheating will not disappear if it is ignored.

John Croucher is associate professor of statistics at Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW.