It has been unanimously agreed that cheating, academic dishonesty or misconduct (often used interchangeably) most likely continues to be one of the biggest epidemic problems in education at all levels; particularly, it poses a serious problem across college campuses. Needless to say, the honor system seems to have been thrown out the window. It has also been come up with the idea that academic dishonesty painfully has its own psychological and social roots correlated to cheating. Obviously, there are countless ways for students to cheat. No much attention has been paid, linguistically or whatsoever, to these ways. What is impressing is that cheating constitutes a semiotic system; a "science of signs" - borrowed from the discipline of linguistics. This paper postulates that cheating has applied a semiotic system in order to understand the communicative qualities of the various “creative” tactics students use to cheat on in-class examinations. It seeks to enhance our understanding of the meaning and experience communicated by cheating, i.e. by a further application of the semiotic method. This paper starts with presenting an overview of semiotics, and then clarifying the ways semiotics may be of relevance to the study of cheating and cheating analysis. The present study, however, offers a terminological part of the definition and typologies of cheating. In order to crystallize and further our understanding of the semiotic meaning of cheating, we work out an analysis in which the psychological and social variables are laid out to be wrapped up with some findings and conclusions arrived at. In this paper, the focus here is on cheating, being a discourse of power, as committed by the university students at the Department of English / College of Arts.
Key words: semiotics, semiosis and semiology, cheating, crib-notes (Barasheem, as is called in Iraqi Colloquial), communication, sign and symbol, interpretant, discourse of power, object, representmen, signifier and signified, technological gizmos, and banal objects. |