The high school graduation exams held in Romania this year and the previous years show the way the Romanian education system trains our children to cheat. To copy during an exam means to cheat. To copy during the high school graduation exams means to ground the academic and professional training process on cheat. It is this intellectual fraud act that gives birth to our policemen, customs officers, City Hal and Post clerks, shop assistants, company employees, doctors, lawyers, judges and even politicians, bribe-takers, to call them by one word. I am apologizing to those who are different and who make the majority, including my own children. But the Romanian organizational culture is one of cheat and corruption. It is the criminals and the scoundrels who give the tune. The generalized corruption system survives due a minority of criminals and scoundrels. No matter how honest all the others are, those who want to cheat can cheat due to this minority. Some of my students are people who cheated on their high school graduation exams. In the latest term I made senior students who had attended the course and seminar on political parties in their 1st year of university not even once. So they had no credits, but they tried to fool me and then to persuade them to give them marks they could graduate with, although they didn't pass the tests, they wrote no papers and did nothing during the seminars. They used so many tricks, they wrote complaints and so on! One female student said I had to give her a mark to graduate, for she was going to two faculties at the same time and she wanted to go abroad to continue her studies, which was not possible unless she had two graduation diplomas. If we let them, some of my students would cheat on and on. They never read the bibliography. If they do, they read summaries written by other people or taken from the Internet. They fail to use the methods, concepts and theories used in political sciences, but they want diplomas. The problem is that such people graduate in the end and then they work for the Parliament, the government, the political parties, for administration, ministries and so on. And they pretend to be real experts and councilors, but the state of things in the country is as bad as before, when for the same jobs there would work people with no qualifications for it. Still mind you that there are honest and exceptional students as well, students any professor would be proud of. These are some simple examples from our educational system. But the connections with the other fields where academic training is required are numberless. And the examples are much more. One conclusion is that the educational system must undergo a thorough reform, since our faculties dropped the entrance examination, so they admit high school graduates who cheated every year, not only in the high school graduation exams. When I hear some people's great expectations from the young generation, I burst into laughter, although I should burst into tears. Could we analyze alleged statistics of such negative elements, we could say it doesn't show the prevailing tendency. But it is something very serious that the systems allows students and teachers to cheat. And there are some dysfunctional parents who say the teachers allowing their prodigies to cheat are nice, whereas the others are dragons, no doubt. And even if some have got no such reflexes or intentions, when they see the others are well by cheating, they start thinking about doing the same. Why should they waste so many years studying and risking poor poorer marks? The powerful and dynamic modern nations are those based on exceptional education systems. Romania will become one when exam cheating becomes something dishonoring and those who do it or allow for it face public shame.

Dan PAVEL