Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess

thoughtcatalog.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

31–40 of 147 posts

Re: Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess

#31

Post by robryan »

jsolson wrote: post #10

So, at least where I went to school (Georgia Tech) it is well known and accepted that students have word of basically every question that's ever been asked for any given course. Professors also commonly post previous exams as study guides for courses. Is this not common elsewhere?

Many classes I've taken know this yet still don't bother to change the questions. It actually skews the playing field towards those that have a lot of connections at the university as their more likely to have access to more past exams as many lecturers deliberately avoid placing them online so they can be lazy.

Re: Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess

#32

Post by brisance »

Outside of the United States, there are test standards called the GC(S)E "A" and "O" levels which are roughly equivalent to entrance exams for college/senior high respectively. Because these exams have been going on for DECADES, the examining body has basically given up on guarding these questions i.e. they are regarded to be in the "public domain". Enterprising publishers have called these collections of questions the "10 year series", which are exam questions from the previous decade. There is not a single person in this part of the world who does not own a copy when preparing for those exams.

Re: Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess

#33

Post by rsobers »

This is definitely cheating, but there's an important lesson for the professor: if you care about cheating, don't be lazy. Write your own exam questions and change them often.

You can tell that this is the most exciting event in this professor's life in the past 20 years. Maybe he should try varying his material.

Re: Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess

#34

Post by eightbitman »

holdenc wrote: post #25

What the professor knows: - Some students had an advance copy of the test - The grade distribution indicates cheating What the professor doesn't know: - Who cheated Unless the university has access to a students network traffic proving they had access to the test, there's no way to be sure who cheated. The fact that the professor trudges through threats and vagaries for a full 15 minutes only seems to underscore this…

Hey, at least he feels better now that he grandstanded and made himself feel like a big man catching so many bad little boys and girls.

Re: Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess

#35

Post by Estragon »

psyklic wrote: post #28
gojomo wrote: post #7

But was it really cheating? Some students have pointed out that the professor said repeatedly that he composed the tests himself. Given that, then plausibly, using example tests from other sources would be a legitimate preparation method. (For example, the SAT doesn't penalize people for reviewing lots of practice tests, because it's assumed the actual questions during a real test will be novel.) See: http://www.tech…

Yes, it is really cheating. A publisher's test bank is very clearly not made for students to study from. The publishers warn students not to read them and try to make them inaccessible. In my experience, the professor almost always tells students what they can use to study from. Whether students can use past exams is almost always clarified - I wonder if a student asked in this case. However, here the instructor has…

To me, the morality of what they did is less interesting than the practical ethics of it. The assessment they gamed by accessing the test bank is meant to provide feedback for how well they are acquiring the material. Getting the answers from the test bank means they were more interested in gaming the system for the credential than they were in feedback about where they need to strengthen their understanding. That suggests to me that they're not really interested in the course material, and I wouldn't be interested in working with any of them in any context which used that material. That's an ethical failure. It could be a failure of the course and the educational system, rather than of the students themselves, but it's a problem, no matter who you assign the blame to.

Re: Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess

#37

Post by melissamiranda »

jsolson wrote: post #10

So, at least where I went to school (Georgia Tech) it is well known and accepted that students have word of basically every question that's ever been asked for any given course. Professors also commonly post previous exams as study guides for courses. Is this not common elsewhere?

Dartmouth College and Stanford Business School classes did. We often had old tests to study from. Professors need to work harder and think up new questions each year!

Re: Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess

#38

Post by pohl »

cool-RR wrote: post #26
sid0 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I guess an important question is whether this test bank is supposed to be accessible only to instructors. Presumably a test bank would contain enough questions for several tests, so it isn't necessary that there were any repeats from previous semesters.

I think that if the instructors are allowed to be lazy enough to use a test bank, then students can't be blamed for using it as well.

I'm shocked to see so many pro-cheating comments get up-voted on HN.

Why shouldn't a community of professors be able to cache and re-use questions? The bank should have been secured, yes. But caching/pooling is on ethical ground more solid than that of cheating.

Re: Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess

#39

Post by julius_geezer »

A close relative teaches in a continuing-ed masters program. The first two or three times she taught the class, the grades on the midterm were OK, but reasonably distributed. This fall, they were uniformly excellent. She concluded that the students had copies of her exams from previous semesters, and rewrote the final.

As far as I know, it never occurred to her to tell the students off. Of course, these are twenty-somethings and probably a lot less susceptible to brow-beating.

Re: Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess

#40

Post by pohl »

gojomo wrote: post #7

But was it really cheating? Some students have pointed out that the professor said repeatedly that he composed the tests himself. Given that, then plausibly, using example tests from other sources would be a legitimate preparation method. (For example, the SAT doesn't penalize people for reviewing lots of practice tests, because it's assumed the actual questions during a real test will be novel.) See: http://www.tech…

At some point, knowing all the answers to all potential questions is knowing the material

How do you explain the bimodal distribution?

Post reply on HN