Comment by contravariant | Hacker News Reader

Comment by contravariant | Hacker News Reader

To me looking up old exams is normal, it's not even remotely cheating, heck it may even be expected. Saying a website that lists old exams is 'ostensibly' a study aid seems disingenuous. Poisoning said site with wrong information is just making things harder for the students which is the opposite from what a teacher is supposed to be doing.

However what I don't understand is why that even mattered.

Were the students just learning the questions and answers by heart to regurgitate them on the final exam? If they had any understanding at all they should have caught on, but even if they didn't they would simply demonstrate their lack of understanding, it is not dishonest.

Or did they get to fill in the answers unsupervised somewhere? Because if they were left unsupervised with access the web then this is likely just the tip of the iceberg, they could more easily cheat by discussing the questions with each other.

Edit: Reading more carefully it was a take-home exam apparently, which seems to have consisted of multiple-choice questions that are largely the same each year. I can vaguely see how looking up old exams would invalidate it as a test, but if your test is invalidated by normal exam preparation is it the exam's fault or the student's?

For all he knows, the students went to a site with study materials to prep for a test. His policy of disallowing students to refer to prior tests was not even explicit in the syllabus, but behind a link. If this policy were clear upfront - absolutely, reference to outside materials is inappropriate and there should be consequences. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to impose these consequences after the fact based on a reference to a reference.

Based on his post, my assessment is that the prof is lazy and an asshole. Maybe there are other relevant factors that would change my analysis, but I have to think this is the version of the story that puts the prof in the most favorable possible light, so….

For all he knows, the students went to a site with study materials to prep for a test.

Generally previous exams are good for checking that you understood a topic but you can not really study a topic only from past multiple choice tests. If they had studied the topic and gained some understanding, they would have noticed that the answers are wrong. Even just looking at two different past exams would probably reveal that something is off.

I had a similar reaction. I was surprised that this school's policy forbids looking at old exams. I checked my alma mater's policies and they do not. Students openly sought out copies of old exams from upperclassmen or from repositories kept by a few cliques/clubs. Some professors themselves provided a collection of old tests so everyone had easy & equal access.

I guess an important difference is going for engineering, it was trivial for professors to change numbers & details from year to year so old tests could aid study but not provide answers.

>To me looking up old exams is normal, it's not even remotely cheating, heck it may even be expected.

When I was at uni in the early 90's, several of my professors handed out older versions of their tests so that we could see the shape of the thing and prepare. We all appreciated it, too.

Yeah, I feel the same. Where I went to university, printing, scheduling and proctoring exams was a central university function, and it was university policy to publish hard-bound copies of exam papers - including for courses no longer offered - going quite a long way back in the university library (both for students use, and for future academic study). Lecturers / course coordinators have no say on whether this happens.

Students would commonly complete multiple past exams going back years, and anyone struggling with a question could ask a tutor about it in one of the labs (so that they actually learn the underlying principles).

A lecturer re-using an exam question verbatim in that environment would be considered reckless.

It sounds like the rules are different a Sacramento State University - perhaps to facilitate verbatim reuse of questions (which sounds like sacrificing educational quality for lecturer convenience). I do think, however, that this is exposing poor educational practices that reflects negatively on the university and the lecturer as much as on the students.

It was an online course and the exam was online too.

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