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

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

#81

Post by ndl »

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…

Some other threads (and news articles) mention a video clip in which the professor claims he will write the test himself. By doing so, this professor implicitly declared the test bank (and everything else on the Internet) fair game for studying from.

The students probably messed up big time by not reporting that the test was publicly available first, but I think we're missing some important facts and only seeing one man's edited version of events here.

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

#82

Post by jeff95350 »

protomyth wrote: post #78
jeff95350 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even assuming the teacher was lazy, or plagiarized the test, that's simply no excuse. Anyone who sees questions that they had early access to from some special source (a source not available to all students) has a clear ethical responsibility to inform the teacher that they had special access. It might be slightly ambiguous when, by happenstance, a few questions are the same or similar. But when all of the questions…

So, the crux of your argument is that these students had a "special source (a source not available to all students) has a clear ethical responsibility to inform the teacher that they had special access." I take it that you believe members of Greek / Clubs on campus that have old tests are dishonest (not everyone is a member)? A student buying a study guide that finds the teacher just used a sample test from the study…

"I can make a bunch of honest decisions in my studying for a class and then become dishonest by the dishonesty of a teacher"

The thing that I think you are missing is that it's all about mutual expectations.

It's the same thing if you take a picture of a TV and put it on eBay for $100. Then, someone buys it and you send them the picture of the TV rather than the TV itself. That's totally unethical of the seller, even if they never say that they are selling a TV explicitly. The buyer expects to receive a TV, and the seller knows that the buyer expects to receive a TV, and proceeds knowing that the buyer's expectation is flawed. Maybe the seller really likes photographing TVs as a form of art, and thinks that their work is worth $100 per print (honest so far); but that doesn't matter because they knew the buyer had other expectations, and did not inform them (dishonest now).

The fact that many students didn't have access to the test ahead of time, and that the students received the test surreptitiously (as another comment said) is evidence of the teacher's expectation, and of the students' knowledge of the teacher's expectation. The fact that students knew this expectation was flawed means that saying nothing is dishonest.

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

#83

Post by icco »

This disgusts me, but I totally believe it, as a college student seeing these kinds of numbers do not surprise me at all.

Where I go to school though, the test is given at one hour on one day. The whole you have 52 hours to take the test thing. It seems like whoever takes it first could still help others study.

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

#84

Post by PostOnce »

bdonlan wrote: post #58
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…

On the contrary - there's a few things they can do. They could examine the difference in results between the two tests at the individual-student level, for example. Or, using the set of students who admit to their cheating as a training set, do a question-level analysis.

Doesn't prove anything. Sometimes you don't get enough sleep and do poorly on a test. Sometimes you just have a great day. Using statistics as though they are hard facts and not merely suggestions of likelihood is a terrible idea when there is a question of guilt or innocence.

I have in the past had wildly fluctuating grades. Don't believe everything your powerpoint-prettied software stats tell you.

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

#85

Post by NHQ »

dschobel wrote: post #21

You have to think that if the professor really could identify the culprits he'd be limiting the retakes to them. Maybe the real test here is for the students to realize that there is no "forensic analysis" in the world which could identify a cheater with 100% confidence except for the confession he is trying to bully out of them.

Yeah if the cheating students took game theory courses as well, they would know that the best action would be to remain silent. Stupid students!

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

#86

Post by jeff95350 »

Hoff wrote: post #50

Your job as a teacher or as a presenter is to extend the available materials, and to provide me with insights that I might not gain from Googling existing materials. Not to prevent me from accessing the available materials. Not to control access to information. If what I am learning from your teachings and from your tests and from other students can be entirely replaced by Googling through test banks, then you're not…

"Your job as a teacher or as a presenter is to extend the available materials"

I'm puzzled by this. Let's say you teach basic physics or algebra... how are you supposed to "extend" the material, particularly testing material?

I always thought the benefits of having a teacher were: 1. Human contact 2. Ability to answer arbitrary questions in an instant 3. Ability to adapt lectures to the audience 4. Students in the presence of a room full of other people trying to learn the same thing at the same time

Those would all be great benefits even if the tests were all the same, administered in a standardized way, nationwide, by third-party proctors with third-party graders.

That's not to say that there's anything wrong with independent study, online courses, or ad-hoc groups of students learning together.

I just take issue with the idea that a teacher, in order to do their job, must also compose novel tests every year as though the new tests would somehow be better than all the other tests used over the years. If teaching honest students, it just doesn't sound like an efficient use of teaching resources to re-invent the wheel each time.

And there are objective benefits to using the same or similar tests from year to year. One is that you can see if your class is improving or lagging in specific areas compared with previous classes. That could help you hone your teaching over the years. Wow, I tried playing this game to illustrate economics, and these students scored way higher on the arbitrage questions than the previous 5 years! Or: "gee, I thought that group project might be good, but the test scores dropped this year".

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

#87

Post by psyklic »

irahul wrote: post #65
psyklic wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> In my experience, the professor almost always tells students what they can use to study from. No one have any say (if they have, they shouldn't) in what a student chooses to study. The student might choose to study from some cliff notes, class notes, books or test banks. The professors, at best, can make a suggestion/recommendation which the student is free to ignore, because hell, he is willing to bear the outcome…

I agree with you, philosophically. But the issue is that if a professor or other relevant authority says "you cannot use X to study" and you DO use X, then you are definitely very clearly cheating. In this case, test banks are clearly labeled that they are not to be used for students.

What if the professor says not to review past exams, because he may use questions from them. You still say it would be okay to use past exams to study? Well this is similar - the test bank says: students, do not use this to study. Obviously the teacher should have made up his own questions, but the students definitely knew better ...

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

#88

Post by pohl »

electromagnetic wrote: post #74
pohl wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Why shouldn't a community of students be able to cache and reuse responses to cached and reused questions? Laziness begets laziness. I don't see how you can claim it's ethical for teachers to forfeit 1/2 of their job to a question cache. Cheating in this definition is using someone else's work to benefit yourself and by definition the teacher cheated too by using someone else's questions to form "his" alleged test. I…

Why shouldn't a community of students be able to cache and reuse responses to cached and reused questions?

Call me old fashioned, but the roles of "student" and "instructor" make all the difference here to me. Although I'm not surprised that youngsters these days feel entitled to this behavior. Entitlement runs deep in modern American youth.

Are students entitled to lecture, assign homework, and hand out grades too?

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

#89

Post by luker »

ajays wrote: post #66

The solution, of course, is to have open-book, open-notes tests. Let the students bring any notes, books, etc.; anything but a communication device. The questions need to be novel and challenging enough so that the students who understand the material can walk out in no time; the students who don't, can sit around flipping through their notes. Of course, this approach requires the _professor_ to do a lot more work. (…

Exactly. The best professor I ever had did exactly this and he was from India and dressed like a cowboy (not important but awesome). He posted a few previous semester's tests online. And he allowed us to bring whatever assignments, reference manuals, etc. (except for computers) into every test, but wrote a brand new test. I think this sort of thinking came about because he was just the kind of teacher that really cared that his students wanted to learn and it showed in the lab assignments and when he was actually giving lecture. This is when you know what learning is really about and you stop worrying about grades.

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

#90

Post by psyklic »

protomyth wrote: post #78
jeff95350 wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even assuming the teacher was lazy, or plagiarized the test, that's simply no excuse. Anyone who sees questions that they had early access to from some special source (a source not available to all students) has a clear ethical responsibility to inform the teacher that they had special access. It might be slightly ambiguous when, by happenstance, a few questions are the same or similar. But when all of the questions…

So, the crux of your argument is that these students had a "special source (a source not available to all students) has a clear ethical responsibility to inform the teacher that they had special access." I take it that you believe members of Greek / Clubs on campus that have old tests are dishonest (not everyone is a member)? A student buying a study guide that finds the teacher just used a sample test from the study…

It is all about what a teacher or other relevant authority says is okay to use. If the teacher explicitly says not to use old exams, then the members of Greek clubs are cheating if they use their archives. Similarly, if a publisher's test bank says that students may not use it, then it is cheating if students use it to study.
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