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

131–140 of 147 posts

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

#131

Post by runningdogx »

roadnottaken wrote: post #48
cool-RR wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is completely wrong. If the students are allowed to use the test bank questions, then it's ethical. If it's not provided to them, or they obtain it surreptitiously, then it's cheating. Practice tests are allowed for the SATs, but previewing the questions was clearly not allowed in this case. These rules are arbitrary , but real. Just because certain exams are open-book, doesn't mean all students are entitled to…

If it were a process-oriented class, that might be justified. For instance, in a pure math course, you wouldn't want to read an off-syllabus math text in which the author proves theorems that show up on later problem sets or exams.

However, those sorts of courses are not typical, and it falls to the professor to make clear and explicit if external material is forbidden, and to explain why.

Since the existence of a test bank implies the exam was (mostly) multiple choice, the above concerns do not apply. There is no reason to forbid students from learning from external resources if your idea of testing them on their knowledge is giving them a multiple choice test.

The proper (and common) scope for restricting external materials is an individual problem set, quiz, or test. It's implied unless stated otherwise that you shouldn't get help for specific problems or questions from external resources, but it is almost never implied or stated that external resources are banned in the scope of an entire class. In that context, if you go exploring for materials and find something that helps you on a later problem set, quiz, or test, that's your reward for seeking out more materials to learn from.

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

#133

Post by runningdogx »

Here's the video of a part of the first lecture in which he claims he writes the test questions:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJG7aCQtI8E

Based on that, I think a reasonable student would conclude that even if a publisher's test bank is not supposed to be accessible to students, using that test bank would not constitute cheating. Since the prof wasn't forthright in stating that he would use the publisher's test bank, he has no right to complain that students used it to study.

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

#135

Post by electromagnetic »

jimbokun wrote: post #115
electromagnetic wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 v…

The students are accused of plagiarism by a teacher who is essentially plagiarising test questions. The students are accused of cheating - I contest that the professor is too.

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

#136

Post by electromagnetic »

jimbokun wrote: post #113
electromagnetic wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

FYI you don't need to post essentially the same comment twice.

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

#137

Post by jimbokun »

electromagnetic wrote: post #136
jimbokun wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 o…

FYI you don't need to post essentially the same comment twice.

Point taken. :)

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

#138

Post by noamsml »

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?

Same at the University of Michigan, where all previous exams are available, and tests are composed anew each year by the GSIs and professors (usually more the GSIs).

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

#139

Post by pohl »

electromagnetic wrote: post #135
jimbokun wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 v…

The students are accused of plagiarism by a teacher who is essentially plagiarising test questions. The students are accused of cheating - I contest that the professor is too.

I realize that accusatory turnabout is a fun exercise, but what you have here only meets the form of turnabout, and not the substance. One of the key indicators that you've gone off the rails: your turnabout necessitates conceptual contortions in order to make a false equivalence.

In your post above, you falsely claim that the students are being accused of plagiarism. They are not. While plagiarism can be a kind of academic dishonesty, it is not the particular kind of academic dishonesty at issue here. Then, to complete your false equivalence, you try to re-frame the de rigueur practice of drawing test items from an item bank as plagiarism, which is just laughable and ignores both the purpose of the test instrument and the different roles of student and teacher.

I contest that the professor is too.

The word "contest" in the above context means "to oppose as mistaken or wrong". So your sentence literally reads that you dispute that the teacher is also cheating. Clearly you have been arguing the opposite.

I think it might be time to give it a rest.

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

#140

Post by T_S_ »

sequoia wrote: post #114
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…

It's hard, not because it is hard to think up questions, but because it is hard to anticipate their level of difficulty. This usually requires some data to measure. Teachers would rather spend effort measuring the students than the questions.
Post reply on HN