Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scott_s | Hacker News Reader

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Some students have blamed Quinn, accusing him of misleading them and being lazy. They posted clips from the first class's lecture, in which Quinn can be seen telling his students that he is responsible for creating the test. The students have tried to use this statement to justify their acts; since Quinn told them he would be writing the exam, they did not think the prefab version they were using to study would be used. "After seeing that, it was safe for us to assume that having it online, having it e-mailed to you, whatever it was, wasn't the test,” one student told the Associated Press. “No student knew that was the test, and that's what we continue to say over and over." The university has rejected that argument. "Let's be sure to keep the focus where it belongs," Heston told the Orlando Sentinel. "Not on the instructor who administered the test but on those students who chose to acquire the test beforehand and use it inappropriately."

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.

The blame isn't for studying the old test. It's for not letting the instructor know they had seen the exam already. That's when their behavior crossed an ethical line.

The instructor isn't blameless here - he both misrepresented his creation of the tests, as well as was lazy and pulled questions from his test bank. But the students should have let him know that they had acquired the test ahead of time.

Nobody came out of this looking good.

this. Why isn't this 100% clear to anyone with a brain?

Because it's a slippery slope. What other information sources do students need to disclose? Is it fair for a student with access to another student that already took the class to ask him questions? Should that be disclosed to the professor or taken into account during grading?

"Slippery slope," in a sense, only really applies when the slope is steep enough that its slipperiness matters. In particular, there is an obvious difference between "I've discussed problems like this with someone who knows the material" and "I've studied exactly these questions and their answers for the last week."

In the former case, having discussed the material, one is still required to apply one's knowledge in order to produce correct answers on a test. In the latter, one need only reproduce from memory answers one doesn't (necessarily) understand.

I don't think that's the slippery slope part. I think the slippery is not WHERE the test/information was procured, but HOW it was. If they merely bought the teacher's textbook, then it's not cheating. Even if they knew most of the exam's question came from that textbook, it's not cheating. It's lazy, and doesn't foster real learning, but it's not cheating. To me, this isn't a story on cheating, this is a story on laziness, and what acceptable level of laziness is allowed in higher education.

It all depends on the class expectations. I am in law school right now and most professors will post their previous tests in the library. But they make a new one from scratch each semester that is similar too, but not the same as the last one.

I have also had numerous classes in math where the instructor would hand out a superset of the test questions about a week ahead of time. The students had every single question in their hands early, they were just mixed in with a bunch of other similar ones.

The difference is that everyone involved knew the rules ahead of time. Here that was not the case. Of course, that was not the case at least partially because the professor failed to lay out the rules in a forthright fashion.

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