Cheating, a form of academic dishonesty, is commonly regarded as a problem in science education. This inquiry theorizes cheating not as a moral failing on the part of students or a lack of surveillance by teachers but rather as a resistance to testing. Ethnographic data from a university physical science department, analyzed with Michel Foucault’s theory of governmentality, suggests testing as a technique of disciplinary power to produce normalized cases, schooled subjects of a certain type. The resistance of cheating is an assertion of agency within inequitable power relations. As such, cheating and testing are mutually constituting. This inquiry aims to trouble the notion that testing is educationally beneficial by discussing how testing may be placing students in morally compromised positions and teachers in morally complicit positions.

作弊是一种学术上的不诚实行为，通常被认为是科学教育中的一个问题。这项探究将作弊理论化为作弊，不是因为学生道德上的失败或老师缺乏监督，而是作为对考试的抵制。来自大学物理科学系的人种学数据，用米歇尔·福柯的政府性理论进行了分析，建议将测试作为一种纪律力量的技术，以产生规范化的案例，对某些类型的受教育者进行测试。作弊的抵制是在不平等的权力关系中代理的主张。这样，作弊和测试是相互构成的。该讨论旨在通过讨论测试如何将学生置于道德上受损的位置而教师置于道德上同谋位置的方式来质疑测试对教育有益的观念。