Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

This has happened to me three (3) times in my life.

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."

These students (or their parents) are paying UCF to provide them with this education and then to certify their education with a diploma.

The responsibility does not fall to the students to inform a professor that due to his own laziness they, through entirely moral and acceptable means, had already studied these exact questions.It's not a student's responsibility to tell the professor how to do his job.

He failed his students. Period. Calling it anything else is putting frosting on dogshit.

Moral fiber plays no role here. They didn't stay silent as some unspeakable wrong occurred. They studied a publicly available guide. It comes down to this. Is it the students' responsibility to inform a professor every single time they see a test question that they recognize or is it the professors responsibility to prepare a proper test of their knowledge?

I really hope you are not representative of your generation, but I suspect you are.

Same thinking as "no call, no foul". Really sad.

Is it taking advantage of the professor's foolishness that is really sad or the failure to let him know that you are doing so?

oh give it a rest with the "my(older) generation acted with morals/humility/respect while your(younger) generation has no morals/shame/responsibility"

it's an old script that gets repeated with every generation around the time when the new gen gets to be 18-28. it's like the "HN is becoming reddit" alarms that cry out every 3 months or so.

the crux of your (or at least the most compelling) arguments is these students did nothing wrong studying but should have had it in them to say "hey i've seen this before". Did i get the gist?

The crux of my argument is that in a societal structure such as a college where the students pay large sums of money to be educated it is morally wrong to take that money and then do nothing to actually test their knowledge.

i believe what the students did was a moral misdemeanor and the professor committed the felony. yet you seem more interested in prosecuting the students than fixing the larger issue.

If you review the footage of the professor confronting the students, you will realize that this was not a publicly available test guide. This was a pool of test questions based on the material in their books intended only for the teachers of the courses to create the tests, not the students to study from.

They obtained the test blank using, at best, morally questionable methods (social engineering, purchasing them under false pretenses, etc). At worst, they stole the materials outright.

If they had used information that was legitimately publicly available, I would agree with you. However, they did not, so it was morally reprehensible.

hmm, now this is new information that in my quick reading i missed.

though even with this i would side with what sph said below. The fact that 200 students (and not something like 10) got the guide tells me the original act wasn't one intending to "cheat" so much as study extra material.

the professor told the students he made their tests, so there was nothing that should have lead them to believe these extra questions would be on the test.

does it make their act a little more morally gray? yes. does it constitute as cheating? no.

My sister-in-law teaches English in South Korea, where grades are even more important than they are here to a child's future, and cheating has even graver consequences (entire college career, and thus their future in knowledge jobs are gone).

Yet, they still cheat.

Perhaps I'm just being pessimistic, but I don't believe that 200+ students believed they just had study material. I believe they knew they were cheating; else you would have had at least 1 of the 200 step forth and say "You know, this is identical to the study material I received from my friends...". Even the person who did eventually clue in the professor did so anonymously by dropping the complete test script in his office.

Of course, blaming this on the professor seems overly optimistic about the state of mind of those 200 students.

Either way, I would not want one of those 200 students working for me. If they don't have the moral fortitude to admit that something is wrong on a test in college... I can't imagine what they could do to a company where moral standards are core to a companies very survival; such as a company which handles customer credit data where a single leak of customer data can sink the company.

Wait, so are you claiming that upon receiving the study material these kids had to have known they were cheating? Or they knew they were cheating upon receiving the test?

Because the former is preposterous. It was a pre-fab "teachers" test from their textbook publisher. It sounds like the perfect thing to take the night before the real test to see what you may need to look over one more time.

The latter is less preposterous, but still in the wrong mind. Is it the student's job to disclose what they studied? Frankly as long as they didn't actively steal their professors test I don't see how they can be put at fault. They studied hard, studying extra material, and got lucky when their professor decided to forgo doing his job and mailed-in the creation of his test. So now it's their fault for not telling the professor "hey it seems you copied someone else's work"?

These sound like regular college students in a 600 person business class just trying to graduate. They're not the morally bankrupt scourge of the earth, and your damning evidence against their employability (or apparent lack thereof) is based on them not coming forth because of a study guide?

mccon104 - your thinking regarding what my response should have been when I "Got Lucky" and discovered I had seen the test ahead of time, is pretty much what mine was when I was in Grade 12. I was wrong. The ethically correct response is to let an instructor know if you've already seen an exam that has been just handed to you. At that point, the only person in the wrong is the instructor who was too lazy to create a test that would have been new for their students.

Note - it's one thing for a high-school student to screw up (as I did) - we can only hope that the teacher calls them on it, and they learn from their experience (as I like to believe I did). What's a little disconcerting here is that these were Senior Level college students, who one would hope would have at least a _few_ people who would have stood up and said "Hey - I've seen this before."

I wouldn't have stood up and said that, unless the tests were identical (i.e., questions were in the same order, with the same pagination, same ordering of the multiple choice answers, etc.). Even if some questions were identical, if I had not endured an experience like yours, there is nothing about the situation that would suggest to me that what was happening was ethically murky.

  They obtained the test blank using, at best, morally 
  questionable methods (social engineering, purchasing them 
  under false pretenses, etc).

Why do you believe that?

When I've bought the teacher's guide to a textbook in the past, no authentication as a teach was required whatsoever.

So, I agree with you in large part. The instructor failed his students. By pulling questions out of a test-bank that would likely be available (and obviously was) to his students, he both signaled too high a level of accomplishment to those students who had the exam, as well as too low (in comparison) to those who didn't have the exam.

I think the ethical lines that were crossed by the students were more clear if the students realized that _the exact questions_ had been found on a test they had studied from. If there were students who realized that they had studied from the same test, then that is where they had a personal responsibility to stand up and say "Hey - This isn't fair. I've already _seen_ these questions, I had an advance copy of the exam."

Nobody is saying this was an unspeakable wrong. It was the moral equivalent of keeping an extra twenty that your ATM machine accidentally disbursed to you. It's the rare individual that goes into the bank to report the error, but it's the right thing to do.

I've been in several university classes that issued practice exams which contained questions that showed up word for word on the test. It's actually pretty common.

I suppose if I found the actual test listed the questions in the same order as the practice test, that would be worth noting. But it doesn't sound like that's the case. The professor and his students merely pulled from the same test bank. Since it is so common for questions to be recycled, even years later, I have a hard time finding fault with the students. I think the professor is entirely to blame.

Given that it's business school, it seems quite likely (or at least possible) that any of them who had seen the test bank in advance paid for the privilege. That does say sad things about students, but arguably it also says sad things about how things work in 'the real world,' to which students look for examples of what is socially acceptable. In the wake of the financial crisis, a great many people have drawn the inference that cheaters prosper.

Regrettably, research suggests that the problem is only going to get worse: http://josephsoninstitute.org/surveys/index.html

A test should require a student to synthesize and apply information he or she has learned to solve a problem. If the students truly did not know that they were looking at the actual test they would be taking, all they have proven is that they have learned the information they were supposed to learn.

Thus, we are faced with two alternatives: * That the students memorized the test questions and answers knowing full well that they would be presented with those exact questions for the real examination and then lied about it to appear less culpable * That the students studied from a variety of sources, learned the information they were supposed to learn, and then happened to get lucky because one of the direct sources they had studied from happened to be the test that they took--in this case, the test has accomplished its purpose

Do I agree that some student should have said, "Hey - I've seen this"? Yes, pretty much. But what then are the consequences? As I see them

1. 199 people who think they are in hog heaven are furious with you for ruining their good thing.

2. 400 people who have put serious time into preparation see their planning ruined. (Yes, they should be studying; but also, their time is finite, and they spent time preparing for this exam on this date, which they might have spent otherwise.)

Would I have had the nerve (moral fiber, whatever)? I hope so, but don't know.

3. 199 students + 1 are not spared the inquisition.

It seems unlikely that you as an individual would know how many other students in the class had access to that same guide. Regardless, I don't think it really matters; they should have notified the professor.

It's not unreasonable to extrapolate from "got it from a friend-of-a-friend" to "quite a lot of people will have this".

Yes, one should notify the professor; but I think it's acceptable to do this a little less publicly (e.g. by writing it on the test or sending an e-mail), if one so desires.

The prof pointed out that one student out of the 200 fessed up (I'm not sure whether anonymously or not) shortly after the fact because their guilt got the better of them.

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