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Comment by phkahler | Hacker News Reader

Yes, he is unethical. He didn't just catch students cheating. He actively sabotaged the cheaters. He says he placed a (metaphorical) camera to catch the cheaters, but if he didn't pay attention to it they would have failed anyway because he planted wrong answers for them to find. Thinking about it now, he could have just graded them with the wrong answers and left it at that (a different ethical question), but it seems he was determined to "get" them, call them out, and punish.

To be clear, I'm not supporting the cheaters. There are two wrongs here. "Am I the unethical one?" should instead read "am I unethical?" to avoid any discussion about which is worse. Suppose I went on the site and uploaded wrong answers, thereby clearly sabotaging cheaters. Clearly that would have negative consequences for those students and one might ask why would I do that.

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Why is it unethical to be determined to call out and punish cheaters? When I was in college, we had like an academic honesty pledge that made it clear we would get kicked out of school if they caught us cheating. It's not uncommon (or, I think, unethical) to punish cheating in academic programs.

He sabotaged the cheaters. It's a bit different than just catching them and issuing the usual punishment. I think there is room for debate around the distinction, but from an ethical point of view one should avoid gray areas, and this guy actually teaches ethics - to this class.

He did not sabotage them - the usual punishment is at minimum a zero on the relevant assignment/test/etc., and frequently extends to outright failing out of the class. Scoring worse on the test due to their cheating is irrelevant as it'll be reduced to a zero.

From an ethical point of view, he has done these students, the university, and the world at large a huge favor.

Yeah I agree that's the interesting question, but I think "it's bad to want to punish people who cheat" is the wrong take, in general.

I'm inclined to agree. If you're actively putting out misinformation, that's always bad. It feels a bit "entrapment"-ey.

Sort of tangential, but I have always thought teachers/professors who put "trick" questions on tests to be sort of assholes. It's fine if it's an extra credit thing and isn't going to take away from the final grade, but when you write a question that literally everyone in the class gets wrong, I think that says a lot more about your communication or teaching ability than the students.

Exactly. Whether he intended to or not, he - HIMSELF - put two different, equally authorially-dominant, sets of answers into the wild and expected students to pick the best one in what can only be described as an unauthorized (afaik?) social experiment.

Fuck the students who thought "wait, this seems like...way wrong. I feel like he said the exact opposite in class...? But, I mean, this IS the test that I'm looking at, so I guess I'm just misremembering...", is the apparent sentiment. At least he caught the obvious cheaters, right?

> equally authorially-dominant

say what? One is on the official school site, in the lectures and notes from class. Second one is an anonymous upload at the weird unofficial site which does not even have university's branding.

If the students can't tell those two apart, they are in deep trouble and should not be in college.

Those latter students would have been taught in high school not to trust sources without some sort of verification. Trusting that a non-verified, random upload to a cheat/study site is accurate shows lack of critical thinking skills, at best.

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