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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

#111

Post by sequoia »

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.

I, as a non-statistician, agree that he was bluffing. If I were a student in that class with a high grade, cheating or no (because even the innocent may get accused and face the ostensibly severe consequences), I would be thinking "Hmm... Now how exactly does he plan on proving that I cheated?" Without a confession or third party who could reliably state that they know hypothetical-I was cheating, the possibility of actually proving misconduct on an individual level seems extremely remote.

I would love to hear some statistics folks weigh in on this. Or: speculation ftw!

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

#113

Post by jimbokun »

electromagnetic wrote: post #98
pohl wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think entitlement runs deep in American adults who are teaching it to the youth. You blatantly feel that teachers are entitled to perform with a different ethics set as their students, which is personally abhorrent to me. If you have a problem with students cheating at their job of studying , you have to have a problem with teachers cheating at their job of teaching . It isn't an ambiguous issue, it's rather clear…

Applying the word "cheating" to the teacher here is a re-definition of words worthy of Humpty Dumpty. The plain meaning of cheating is to gain an unfair advantage over others in a competition. The teacher administering an exam is not a competitive act on the part of the teacher.

I am deeply disappointed that so many here on Hacker News are resorting to such poor sophistry to defend a very simple, cut and dried case of cheating, and that so many are lending their approval through their up-votes.

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

#114

Post by sequoia »

ltjohnson wrote: post #53

I'm a 5th year PhD student who is teaching a large (80 student) section of a course, this is the 4th course I've taught. I've also taken plenty of exams as a student, and they are still fresh in mind. I would want to know more information before I decided the students were cheating or not. The instructor refereed to an "exam room", and gave an hour range that the new exam could be taken. So the students are not all t…

"Writing a decent exam is surprisingly hard."

I hope I don't come off as flippant, but you're shooting for a PhD, the most advanced degree you can hold (if I'm not mistaken); isn't "surprisingly hard" kind of the name of the game? I'm sure if you ask students, many of them would say taking the test is "surprisingly hard," are shortcuts justified for them too? I'm sure a building contractor will tell you keeping track of and in compliance with environmental and safety regulations is hard, but we expect them to do it nonetheless, because that's his/her job!

Ultimately, whichever method allows the instructor to most effectively perform his or her job is best, and maybe that's question banks. Cases like this one are notable because they call into question the stance that using banks is as effective/more efficient.

Good luck on your degree!

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

#115

Post by jimbokun »

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…

"I don't see how you can claim it's ethical for teachers to forfeit 1/2 of their job to a question cache."

Exactly 1/2 of a professor's job is constructing exams? What part goes to lecturing and preparation? Office hours? Grading those exams and class projects?

"Cheating in this definition is using someone else's work to benefit yourself..."

No, cheating is gaining an unfair advantage in some kind of competition by violating the clearly specified rules. Your definition certainly is not how the word cheat is commonly used, and I have no idea where you came up with it.

I think you are thinking of "plagiarism," which sometimes intersects with cheating, sometimes not.

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

#116

Post by jimbokun »

jules wrote: post #44
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.

On the other hand the prof shouldn't say that he makes the tests himself if he does not. If the professor told you that he'd make his own test then studying from existing tests isn't cheating, right? It's the professor passing others' work off as his own. This video looks like a professor trying to save his own ass by blaming it on the students. You could say the students that used this test to practice should have i…

"However, if you look at how defensive this prof is, that would have been quite risky for that student."

Defensive suggests he acts like he thinks he did something wrong. He clearly thinks his students did something wrong.

What is it with this thread and using words to mean things other than their plain meaning in normal conversation? It's getting very Clintonian in here.

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

#117

Post by jimbokun »

protomyth wrote: post #55
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…

No, I really don't think this is actually cheating. He handed out a test that, while claiming to be original, was actually from a standard bank provided by the publisher. This isn't a SAT or GRE that is standardized by an organization or the U, it is a test in a class that he claimed to be the author of. What really annoys me about this story is he is covering his laziness / inattentiveness to his class of paying peo…

Nothing in what you say suggests that the students did not cheat. You say the professor was lazy. That statement in no way contradicts the statement "the students cheated."

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

#118

Post by Aron »

kleinmatic wrote: post #79

I might have missed something in the video, but if I were an innocent student, the benefit for me in falsely claiming I cheated far outweighs the risk in defending my innocence. The choices as I see them are these, whether you're innocent or not: 1) say that you cheated, and you get to retake the test as though you never took it the first time -- you don't even fail the test! -- but you never get to ask this professo…

An additional penalty for confessing was having to take a 4 hour ethics course.

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

#119

Post by ndl »

psyklic wrote: post #97
ndl wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That does not implicitly declare that a test bank is okay to study from, since it says on it that it is not for students. Any student would question to themselves whether they should use it. So ethically speaking: 1) Ask the professor before the exam if it is okay to use the test bank. He will say, of course not! Why do you have it anyway, it's not made available to students - are you trying to cheat?! 2) Astonished…

1) Many of the students probably received the test from their peers and did not know that it had come from a private test bank. I seriously doubt 200 people independently and individually broke into the same test bank, unless it was actually open to students, in which case it was as much fair game as the rest of the Internet. There are plenty of universities that keep student-accessible test banks and records of old exams (including the two I've attended), so many students probably assumed it was from that type of source.

1.5) Also note that the concept of a "test bank" that is supposedly inaccessible to students is not entirely common knowledge. We don't know how easily accessible and/or clearly warned this information was.

2) I already said that the students were wrong not to mention that they'd seen the test.

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

#120

Post by ShabbyDoo »

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.

Let's say you are a student who was pretty sure that no conclusive evidence existed which proved that you had cheated. The optimal strategy might have been to, in writing, state that (1) you had not cheated but (2) had no way to prove your innocence. You cite your concern that, if you do not confess, you could end up with a failing grade or worse. So, as a practical matter, you have decided to falsely claim that you had cheated. After all, the only penalty (other than your professor never speaking to you again) is wasting four hours of your time in an ethics course.

Note that I did not say above whether or not you had actually cheated. Sadly, this fact is irrelevant with regard to strategy!

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