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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

#101

Post by prodigal_erik »

psyklic wrote: post #87
irahul wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 pas…

If the students consider this material useful to study, it's unethical for a professor to deny them access to it. Making the knowledge harder to acquire is precisely the opposite of his job. Especially when the only reason is that the professor wants to be excused from doing the other part of his job by simply recycling an old test.

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

#102

Post by Hoff »

jeff95350 wrote: post #86
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 pr…

Thinking like the instructor/presenter/seller quite clearly, though also remember to think like the student/purchaser, too.

You're clearly familiar with running the process line and incremental improvements for yourself and optimizing your work, but are you equally comfortable being the widget that's being processed within the assembly line, and whether the widget is getting the best value?

My trip down that educational assembly line was seriously and mind-numbingly unpleasant, and I can only imagine what it's like with all of the current standardized-tests model. Looking back, what we were taught and what we learned for those tests was sufficiently ridiculous and, well, wasteful. We didn't learn that most of what we learned would be outmoded, that the tools we were taught would be gone, and that memorization was far less practical than learning how to research.

As a presenter, I don't want to repeat that for the folks I am teaching. Though thankfully, I don't have to teach to standardized tests.

As an instructor, you're selling a service. Are your students buying?

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

#103

Post by moo »

Students repeat courses, audit courses. Students can be exposed to these canned test questions in this way. Universities push the general learning experience in selling their education product. Those who want to make the student the commodity and control how they learn for better quality control strike me as dyed in the wool bureaucrats.

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

#105

Post by delinquentme »

Im sorry but this is the education system FAILING its students. 1. fear mongering by the prof " FORENSICE ANALYSIS" and "LEGAL ACTION" 2. the SAME test for the last FIVE years? 3. some crap sob story about "what were the last 20 years about" ... how about you being a lazy ass professor?

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

#106

Post by w1ntermute »

boucher wrote: post #61
gloob wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's not provided to them...then it's cheating. The idea that students are only allowed to study from materials that are explicitly provided to them seems questionable. I would preface this with a statement of my own ignorance of the matter, if I weren't presently an engineering student. I have never encountered someone who said "reading material given to you by someone other than the professor is cheating."

I think the intent was to say that if the professor had a reasonable belief that the test bank was secured and not accessible to students, then they probably should have had that same belief, and not used it as a source. I don't necessarily agree with that.

Since the professor stated on the first day of class that he would be creating his own tests, there was no reason for the students to even consider the possibility that a test created by the textbook publisher would be used as the official test.

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

#107

Post by johnglasgow »

After being so upset with his cheating class, why does the professor offer a large time period to re-take the test? It seems like he is baiting the students to cheat again. Can't he set it during a normal class period where everyone takes it at once?

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

#108

Post by psyklic »

fleitz wrote: post #95
psyklic wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 pas…

Isn't the whole point of schooling to know what's on the test? I mean if it was important to be able to do something with the knowledge then they'd focus on that instead of endless tests. If a professor tells you to not do X and you do X you're very clearly not doing what he says, whether that is 'cheating' who knows. A degree is largely a check mark on a check box for a perfect little life of doing what you're told.…

>> Isn't the whole point of schooling to know what's on the test? ... To know more is to waste your time.

In other words, you should do the bare minimum to get by. Well, everyone's motivation for getting a degree is different, and you are welcome to this opinion. However, if this is also your life philosophy, then I think you may be disappointed.

Now, I personally agree that this instructor was lazy. However, in a perfect world actually every single iteration of a class would use the exact same exam. This ensures that every student who ever takes the class is graded in the same way. However, some students retake the class and share exams, so this is not possible.

It's like if you're a magician and you have an awesome magic show. Why make up a new show for each new audience? If the audience is different each time, then your show is still awesome - even if it doesn't change.

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

#109

Post by dkarl »

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…

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.

That is a bizarre definition of cheating and shows that you don't understand the point of testing at all. The point of testing is to measure (perhaps crudely) students' understanding of what they are supposed to learn in the class. The teacher's job is to administer a test that does this effectively, and if a test bank helps him do his job effectively, he should use it. In this case as in so many others, it is perfectly appropriate to use someone else's work as a resource to improve one's own work. In fact, as long as one is honest about attribution, this is highly desired. Test materials are unattributed, and sharing is the assumption, so it isn't dishonest or unprofessional for a teacher to draw from a bank of questions when composing a test.

(Students are claiming that the professor said he created the tests himself, but even if he drew the questions from a test bank, he was still deciding which particular facts and concepts were most important to test. Maybe he said he composed each question himself -- that would be a lie. However, it wouldn't be a lie for him to say he created the tests. It is standard for teachers to compose their own tests but unusual to aim for originality on each question, unless it is an essay test with a small number of questions.)

Why is taking a test different from creating one? If the point of the test was to create a big stack of papers with the right answers on them, it would be appropriate for the students to collaborate and use any resources to accomplish that goal. However, that is not the point. The point is to measure each student's understanding and help decide how much credit each student should be given for their understanding of the material covered by the test.

When students cheat, they subvert the purpose of testing. By hiding their cheating, they dishonestly claim credit for understanding they did not achieve. The professor's job is to administer a test that will test student's understanding. It is not his job to demonstrate his independent powers of test-writing.

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

#110

Post by paulgb »

thisisnotmyname wrote: post #57
brown9-2 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If this was such common knowledge amongst his students at UCF, then why was this the first time that the professor saw the bimodal distribution in the test scores? Why didn't his Summer class's test scores have the same distribution? I think a lot of the comments in this thread are making assumptions about what the students did or didn't do, and might possibly be excusing some unethical behavior because of faulty ass…

As someone who works with data I can tell you that distributions can take on all kinds of unexpected shapes, especially when n=600. I think he's bluffing - the stats can't prove that anyone has cheated. That said, the deal he offered sounded pretty good when compared to the alternative.

My thoughts exactly. If I were a non-cheating student in that class, I would be very tempted to confess anyway, out of fear that I would be a victim of the prof's over-confidence in his statistical analysis. He mentioned being able to supply the dean with a list of people with 95% confidence that everyone who cheated was on the list, with no apparent concern for any false positives. The confession offer is pretty good in comparison.
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