Aspiring teachers have been caught smuggling calculators, mobile phones and impersonating their peers in a bid to cheat on major literacy and numeracy exams they must pass to graduate from university.

A dossier of incident reports from the Literacy and Numeracy Test for Initial Teacher Education Students reveals students surreptitiously searched the internet for answers on a bathroom break, peered at others’ answers and asked test supervisors how many millimetres were in a centimetre.

The high-stakes national tests were introduced in 2016 as a prerequisite for teaching degree graduates following public concern about the quality of teachers entering classrooms.

Candidates who failed the exams three times were previously issued a two-year ban from taking the test but the rules were rel

See Full Page