200 students cheat on senior midterm exam, many blame professor

If that I understand that correctly - the professor used pre-fab questions from the publisher - then I have difficulty putting any blame on the students. That material is not a secret. It does not require subterfuge to gain access to the teacher version of textbooks. If you pull all of your test questions from such a database, then you are vulnerable to this.

I have taught one course as an instructor. I made my own test from scratch. The same is true for all of the classes I have TAed. Our department has a stated policy that using prior exams to study is fair game.

I took a stats class where our final consisted of questions from the book - and we knew this. I was going through the book while studying, saw a question and thought "That looks like one he'd ask us." and I figure the problem out. That exact same question was on the test. Unless there's some fundamental fact I'm missing, I consider that a similar enough situation to treat them the same.

First of all, there is nothing wrong with using old tests to study. This is an acceptable practice, and, at SFU, our Computing Science/Math Student Societies had a Filing Cabinet of old tests that we could photocopy to study from.

The first time this happened to me, it was Physics 12, 100 Mile House - Some of the students had siblings who had taken physics from the instructor. We got the test ahead of time. Took the test - which was identical to one from years gone past. Did well in the test. Teacher Found out, got pissed off with us - I felt like crap.

I ran into this precise situation in my Second Year Data Structures class in '88 in Coquitlam College - there were about 120 students, and we were studying from old test. Only problem is the instructor had used the exact same test at BCIT (another technical college) a week earlier, and so we had a copy of it (unbeknownst to us) - We started taking the test - I realized by question number 2 that I had seen this test, and stood up and approached the instructor letting him know that I had already seen this (I had learned my lesson from High School) - Ironically, he asked me to just try my best, and seemed to hope that I hadn't memorized all the answers. He later asked me to become his Teaching Assistant and Lab Instructor. Honesty pays off. :-)

The final time was at SFU, the instructor had accidentally printed out her new test for students to study from - I picked them up, saw the date, and immediately told her _before_ we took the test. That time she just re-wrote the test and we took it a week later. Once again - zero doubt on how to handle the situation. (Clearly, my high school "cheating" experience was had been a formative experience.)

Net-Net - The cheating is NOT in studying from old tests, it's from realizing you've already seen the test and not letting the instructor know. I didn't realize this when I was in High School, but had matured enough ethically that by 2nd year of college to not even consider taking the test without telling the instructor I had seen the questions.

I think it says very, very sad things about students these days that not ONE of the the 200 had the moral fiber to stand up and say "Hey - I've seen this exam already."

If he didn't this is just further lying from cheaters, but that sounds exactly like something many a professor would claim casually in a class.

If he did say he wrote the test, then all of this is a professor playing cover his ass after telling students he's writing a test when really he was just test bank spelunking.

400 students cheated by school, pay tuition in order to sit in on 600-person classes and memorize hundreds of individual facts by rote, obtain increasingly worthless degrees.

(In all seriousness, this is cheating, but half of all students "study" like this all the way throughout high school and college, and most teachers couldn't give a shit, so I don't see why anyone is freaking out now.)

Throughout college, I would always find at least one alternate text book for the courses I was taking. I'd frequently seek out Teacher's Editions, not hoping to cheat on the exams, but hoping to better understand the material. When assigned an abridged edition, I'd go out of my way to find the unabridged (usually from a library) to see what was omitted and why.

I continue to hope that at least a few of those students had the same impulse: here's another source from which to learn. But perhaps I'm being unrealistic. I left without a degree after 3 years at a really good school, in part because of comments from professors such as "Please read the edition I assigned --- I chose the abridged text for a reason". The reason itself was never stated.

I strongly believe that tests should be unique from year to year, calibrated to what has been taught in class, made hard enough that very few can answer all questions, have no multiple choice questions as they usually just rely on rote memory and be made in such a way that taking the test open book doesn't influence the result of the students (that's mostly for engineering...)

The problem I found when I was a student (and it was much more acute in the US when I was an exchange student at RIT) is that some test instead of measuring if the students understood the materials and was able to use critically, would only test for rote memorization and be worded such that students who have learned the content of the course of by heart without understanding it could still pass...

But later in life, pure rote memorization is useless, understanding the different subjects and being able to apply the knowledge gained during one's studies is what matters...

Using a pre-fab test is the teacher's fault. I am very concerned that the content of the class must have been pre-fab too.

Story: In my early years during my epically ill-advised attempt at an MS degree, I was a TA for an intro to programming course. The class had previously been taught by the same person for a number of years. The new class used an updated version of the language (think MS-BASIC to QuickBasic) and the other TA and I changed pretty much everything.

First day of class, I hand out the standard stuff with the class schedule and when the tests are going to happen. About 5 students are not seen again until the first test. I hand out the test, and see massive confusion in their faces. One (a freshman) actually says to me "This isn't the right test!". I am confused. I walk over, check the test, and say "yes, this is the first test for the chapters we covered". I am still confused, and while they are taking their tests I check the grade book and the 5 haven't turned in their 2 programs. I ask and he didn't know about them. All 5 failed and dropped the course.

After talking to my fellow TA, I found out the old teacher had given the same test for a number of years and every Greek / Club on campus had copies. Oops.

Of course, students must not cheat. But instructors must not create irresistibly tempting opportunities to cheat. If a test becomes available on the internet, it's the instructor, not the student, who fails to meet an ethical responsibility. To ignore the possibility that a copy of your upcoming exam is freely downloadable from a website (nevermind your inbox) would require an inhuman resistance to curiosity. I don't expect the professor in this case would find this reasoning convicning, but if he had even considered it, I doubt he would now be "physically ill, absolutely disgusted, completely disillusioned".

Another example is the "the person who lets someone copy is as guilty as the person who copies" dogma. This idea is routinely cited without explanation or evidence on the first day of classes. It may be practically necessary to punish those who enable plagiarism, but we can say that without denying the philosopical difference between handing in someone else's work and sharing your work with a friend. Indeed, I can't help thinking that Richard Stallman would oppose this kind of rule, which can make people who naturally want to help their friends terribly uneasy about doing so.

For the first exam, I studied honestly and filled my crib sheet with important formulas I didn't want to memorize. I got a decent grade, but nothing spectacular. However, for the second exam I realized that all the questions to the last test were from previous exams, and just printed out the previous years exams as my crib sheet. I got close to a perfect score on this second exam.

Did I cheat?

Once you start limiting the publicly available information student can use to study, the situation gets very sticky very quickly.

>The divide between the generations can be seen in Quinn's lecture to students after the cheating was discovered, and the response posted by a student in the YouTube caption.

I find it fascinating that previous generations have never cheated on a large scale, or when caught have never tried to justify it or weasel out of it. Well, I guess the YouTube part is true, at least.

>McCabe said the shifting norms that relate to cheating make it difficult to say whether the problem has grown worse over time. While acknowledging that his empirical data don't support the conclusion that the problem has worsened, he believes that it has.

Well, I guess handwaving about this generation without providing any solid data or points of comparison for previous generations is sufficient for this (and most "generation gap") articles.

If they gained unauthorized entry into a computer system to grab the test bank, and then advertised their intent to get a copy of the exam over emails on the UCF network, then they're sunk and should just take the amnesty deal. If they got a copy from a TA friend at another school, with the intent to use it as a study aid, then they're on the whiter side of the fuzzy grey line.

This professor places more emphasis on a test with recycled questions than practical work.

Now, in the first test they did well, but in the second test a significant fraction of the class (like 60+%) just wrote in their tests _my_ answers to the practice questions, and some argued that since there was some similarity they should get half credit or something. My reaction was, and still is, wtf?

The professor claimed that he wrote the tests while he was actually using pre-fab tests. One can argue that the pre-fab tests are as good or better than the ones he would write himself and, as such, there's nothing wrong. Except that passing off another's work as your own is usually known as plagiarism. With that declaration, it is perfectly conceivable that students would expect that these pre-fab tests are things from the textbook manufacturer that they could study off of. If that is the case, there is no generational disconnect about cheating and the premise of the article is overblown.

Personally, I'm very sympathetic to the students. Logic tells me that if you're cheating, you try not to spread it around to a group of 200 - most of whom you won't know or trust. I mean, there are two ways it could have played out:

1) You send the exam (or it gets continually forwarded down the line) to 200 people telling them that it's cheating (acting with bad intent). Odds are that one of those 200 is going to tell the professor that you're cheating before the exam. Plan foiled.

2) You send out the pre-fab exam to people thinking it's just a study guide from the teacher's edition of the book since the professor makes up his own exams. It gets widely forwarded because, hey, awesome study guide! Then it turns out that it's the actual exam questions and someone tells the professor that.

#1 seems more believable because it came to light after the exam rather than before. It seems plausible that the professor had been lazy for years using pre-fab tests and by chance got caught this year passing off pre-fab tests as his own. Rather than say, "well, unfortunately a lot of students got a copy of the test before since I wasn't making them myself and we'll have to re-do the midterm", the professor tried to defend himself by attacking the students. By accusing them of cheating, it wasn't his laziness that caused a re-take of the midterm, but cheating students. He shouldn't be blamed for wasting time, it's cheating students.

At the beginning of the article, I really disliked the students - people who didn't want to put in the work trying to get a good grade they didn't deserve. It's possible that's what they were. However, I can't see any evidence that indicates that's the case. All of the evidence seems to point the other direction.

* The professor said he made the tests

* The situation came to light after the exam, not before and one would think someone of the 200+ would snitch before the exam

This isn't a generational disconnect on what constitutes cheating. The students aren't defending themselves saying that it's ok to get a copy of the exam beforehand. The soul searching that the professor needs to do is around his exam preparation.

Let's say there's an open-source econ exam online (someone's written and published it). I, as a professor, print off 600 copies and give it in my class. It just so happens that many of the students, while looking for practice materials, found that exam. It's my fault for using a public exam.

In this case, the professor was using semi-private materials. The questions seem to be from the teacher's edition of the book (you know, the kind with the answers already written in). Yeah, it's not "public", but it isn't quite private either. If students think that you're going to be making your own questions, maybe an exam in the teacher's edition of the book they're using seems like the perfect practice test. It's the material you've been covering, but not the exact exam.

I don't want to sound too harsh on the professor, but sometimes you have to own up. Saying, "I thought that the teacher's edition materials wouldn't be available to students. Unfortunately, they were" makes me feel bad for the situation that both parties are in. It's a little sketchy whether it's ok to grab the teacher's materials of a textbook if you're a student. Clearly it's not all roses - you know that it wasn't written for you (a student), but if it doesn't affect the course of the class it isn't so bad, right?

This feels like when Harvard Business School denied entrance to students who looked at whether other people were admitted. Phil Greenspun wrote about it (http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/philg/2005/03/08/). Baiscally, they gave students a URL that had a code in it (with no check). So, students typed in example.com/admitted?stud=12345 and saw whether they got in. However, they could just change the number and see other people and were accused of hacking. They blamed the students for what was their error when, really, their disclosure of admissions info without protections might have left them open for a lawsuit. And it isn't just "hacking", curious users wondering whether their software was really so bad and those who made typos could cause problems. Imagine that I'm #12346 and you're #12345. I accidentally type in 12345 and pull up you, realize my mistake and pull up me. Now they think that you looked at you and then "hacked" the system to look at me when you're innocent all along.

In this case, even if a few students had malicious intent, it's highly unlikely that a secret conspiracy of 200 students of malicious intent could happen and the vast majority just thought they were getting a practice exam. Now, the professor and the university want to make them out to be immoral cheaters to cover themselves. I'm not saying that getting access to teacher editions isn't problematic and morally above reproach. However, if you're operating under the assumption that the professor isn't using it, it's understandable and certainly not the type of immorality that the professor is trying to paint.

The appropriate response, in that case, would still be to invalidate the exam due to the unfair advantaged gained by the students who studied from the canned one, but I can't see punishing those students much less disparaging their moral character.

Practice examinations are routinely used to study for standardized tests, and the organization responsible for creating and administering the LSAT even sells previously administered tests directly. If that isn't cheating, I can't see how this instance can possibly be construed as such.

An incredible lack of personal responsibility is a growing problem in this generation.

That's all in the first 4 minutes BTW; the rest of it is about the arrangements for re-administration of the test, chastisement of the cheating students, explanation of school ethics policy and so on. I found this equally interesting but for social rather than technical reasons.

I know I've done similar things. Whenever I have a midterm in a class that I know is taught at other universities, I try to track down past exams to go through. They are really helpful to work through similar problems to those being presented on the test.

Also, whenever the class is widespread enough to have solutions to homework and labs posted online, our Professor generally tells us directly on day one, and that we should avoid them.

When these students get to college, why should we expect them to expect any differently?

This argumentation is assuming that the students really did cheat, but I suspect that there is not yet enough conclusive evidence available to make that call.

At my University, it is common for... 1. Departments to post up old exams for students to practice. 2. Professors recommend that you track down older students for their old tests. 3. Students often create practice exams and hand them out to their peers.

I do not believe that all 200 students are guilty of cheating but perhaps the initial few who had their hands on the practice exam knew exactly what they were getting into.

The instructor represented the tests as having been created by himself (a fallacy, as it turned out). If that was the case, then when students saw the exact same questions ahead of time, wouldn't the implication be that the test had been stolen? If that was the case, then wouldn't the students have had a moral imperative to report this fact when they saw the same test during test day?

For other disciplines though, where you're actually there to learn something, I just could never understand why you would do that. Why would you pay money to take classes, and then cheat on tests to avoid having to learn the material. Couldn't you achieve the same result by simply doing nothing?

I graduated with an Engineering degree, and a terrible grade point average. I could still, however, 15 years on, sit the final exam in any of my core classes and pass it. Somehow I doubt that the students copying each other's homework assignments as a "time-management strategy" will be able to do the same thing.

Basically, don't get involved with exams either as an instructor or a student.

Why? Exams hurt all that encounter them (including teachers, markers and even successful students).

And they're pointless by their own terms because knowledge can't be measured.

First rule of cheating: never pass the exam with 100%