h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Huh ???

M.K*

No. B/c thats dishonest & decietful. On a practical note, if found out you'd get in very serious trouble from the institution setting the exam, & the consequences could be dire...

And it's bound to backfire in later life when everyone realises you can't do all the things you said you could!

Having said that, yes, I probably would!

What do you mean by would?

No seriously I never have or would. Although I 'd fight tooth and nail for every mark going if I was close to a different grade.

*looks around nervously*

If I knew there was a way to change them without getting caught, I would have to say.... yes. Though whether i could live with myself afterwards is another matter.....

Yes
Basically, once you've got A levels, nobody cares what you got for O's; once you have a degree, nobody's bothered by A levels (although I sometimes still bung mine in as one of them was very good) Once you have your Master's, nobody asks about your first degree etc UNLESS you apply to a non-British university when your CV seemingly has to have the relevant certicfates for any post-secondary stuff.
There's a subsiduary question: should you lie to your children about your exam results?

The key to this is in the question, whats "a reasonable chance of getting away with it"

Obviously if you had no chance of getting away with it then you wouldn't.
And if you there was absolutly no chance of getting caught well I suspect that most people would be tempted except those who have got top marks anyway.

However given the oportunity to do it without any risk of being caught, How far would you go?

Would that grade D at O level English just creep into being a C, or that 2.2 just go over the border into 2.1 or would you go for a mass revision of your scores? A's all the way

I suppose it depends on what you could gain by doing it.
If the job you wanted depended on the qualification then, well....?

There have been plenty of people caught using false certificates in the past, and thats only the ones who got caught, presumably there are others who did the same thing and are still gainfully employed on the basis of those fakes.

As Wanderinstar said employers very rarely ask about previous qualifications, let alone check them out. So the longer it goes on the safer you would be.

I worked for the same organisation for 13 years in 3 different countries. For the last six years of this I suffered very detailed yearly evaluations. Then I went elsewhere for three years. When I applied for this post the following year, they had lost my file. I was extremely tempted to forge those evaluations.

I guess its similar to what do you fill your CV with... I'm just starting out, and the crap i've put on my cv....

for instance, (and dont all stare at me) I was failed Duke of Edinburgh Gold because we didn't walk half a mile. they approved our walk, and in the end we got failed cos it was half a mile too short. that was after doing everything else (um, senior first aider, a load of sport stuff, and something else, oh yeah.... ham radio). but you can still see it keeked in my cv, amongst my dancing qualifications. and it beside silver and bronze, which i did actually get, so it doesnt look too bad....

its not quite the same thing as changing your grades, but still....

and both my parents have changed their a-level grades in the past, along with saying they were employed whilst not.... to be honest, I'm not sure it really matters. Interviews are there to assess whether you can do the job just as much as your cv. the cv IMHO is just to get your foot in the door.

"should you lie to your children about your exam results?"
If your employer isn't overly bothered by your exam results then I don't think your children would be (although I say that with only 50% of the vote counted )

I personally would change my grades - and at one memorable technical test (a Q&A thing done on a PC) I did just that...i.e. I checked the disk and sure enough the questions and answers were in a plain text readable data file. My rational for this cheating was that it was a far better measure of my computing knowledge that the test itself