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Comment by ghshephard | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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