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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

#71

Post by gojomo »

JeffBlauser wrote: post #68
zacharypinter wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At about 12:47 into the video he mentions that the makeup exam will be open 51 hours. The duration of the test might mean that students can leave and come back (or even take the test at home). If that's the case and students are looking up the answers from the test bank (as opposed to memorizing them all ahead of time), then I'd definitely lean more towards it being cheating.

That's the impression I got; they were bringing the answers to the lab.

My guess for what that meant was different: that you could go to the test room any time in that window, but his emphasis "if you have to give birth, you're going to give birth in the exam room" suggested that once you entered, you were under some observational time control and limits on reference materials for the duration of the test. That is, it was not a 'take-home' test.

The bimodal distribution he showed did not have the massively sharp mode, or bulge at perfection, that might be expected if people were looking at the answer key while answering. Instead, it appeared to be two normal distributions, with different averages, superimposed. That suggests to me imperfect pre-test memorization of a larger answer pool, some of which was forgotten during a monitored in-room test.

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

#72

Post by jtchang »

I use to have a professor that actively encouraged us to review old tests, question banks, friends, anything we could get our hands on. Hell his tests were even open book/notes.

The tests were genuinely difficult. You could pass by looking at the material because some of the questions were just lecture examples with numbers changed. But to really ace the test you needed understanding of the material.

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

#73

Post by WalterBright »

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…

What I suspect is that half of the questions on the test came from the test bank, and half were original to the professor. Therefore, the cheaters can be detected as ones who got the first half nearly 100% correct, and the second half maybe 50% correct.

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

#74

Post by electromagnetic »

pohl wrote: post #38
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.

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. IE benefiting himself by not having to do the actual legwork to write his own test.

I don't think HNers are pro-cheating, I think we're pro-effort. We all work our fucking assess off at things we love, it's a little disrespectful for some shit-ass professor to claim his students are cheating by using HIS method to save time and effort. I call that his students learning a little too much from him.

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

#75

Post by roadnottaken »

gloob wrote: post #54
roadnottaken wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'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."

So if, for example, a student hacks into the professor's computer and steals the test-question to study from, this is OK as long as it wasn't expressly forbidden? I'm not saying they should only study from materials that are provided... but in this case they were clearly using materials that they shouldn't have had access to.

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

#76

Post by jeff95350 »

protomyth wrote: post #56
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.

I am no pro-cheating (as I said in the other thread on this) but I don't see this as cheating. "Why shouldn't a community of professors be able to cache and re-use questions?" Well, the reality of having Greeks / Clubs that maintain a library makes this difficult, but even worse is what it actually says about the class and the teacher. If the class is so cookie cutter than why not just have videos from the publisher…

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 are the same, what are these students thinking? They know that other students are seeing these particular questions for the first time even if they studied intensely.

Students can choose how they learn. But the professors choose how the students are tested, and this test was clearly compromised due to student dishonesty. You can throw other factors in if you want, but dishonest is dishonest.

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

#77

Post by jeff95350 »

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…

"You would risk being accused of cheating [if you informed the teacher that you had special access]."

The epitome of rationalization.

Academic honesty is taken seriously, and there are third parties that evaluate the situation objectively. If you simply say, "I didn't do anything that I thought of as cheating, but today on test day I realized that I had an advantage that I wanted to inform you about," there is zero chance of permanent consequences.

"So instead somebody did it anonymously."

Why didn't everyone then? Maybe those few people are honest, or some approximation thereof. But what about the other ~190 that didn't?

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

#78

Post by protomyth »

jeff95350 wrote: post #76
protomyth wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am no pro-cheating (as I said in the other thread on this) but I don't see this as cheating. "Why shouldn't a community of professors be able to cache and re-use questions?" Well, the reality of having Greeks / Clubs that maintain a library makes this difficult, but even worse is what it actually says about the class and the teacher. If the class is so cookie cutter than why not just have videos from the publisher…

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 guide is also dishonest?

I guess my big problem with your reasoning is that I can make a bunch of honest decisions in my studying for a class and then become dishonest by the dishonesty of a teacher.

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

#79

Post by kleinmatic »

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 professor of a lecture with 600 students for a favor. 2) don't admit that you cheated, get caught in some dragnet based on pretty flawed statistical reasoning (or better yet, a witch-hunt), and "not graduate." 3) Best case scenario: You say nothing, don't get accused of anything, and you get the undying loyalty of the professor, though that loyalty fails at the first try, because it doesn't extend to you getting out of a test you by definition shouldn't have to take in the first place.

I'm a bit stunned that only 200 students "confessed."

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

#80

Post by Groxx »

jeff95350 wrote: post #77
jules wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

"You would risk being accused of cheating [if you informed the teacher that you had special access]." The epitome of rationalization. Academic honesty is taken seriously, and there are third parties that evaluate the situation objectively. If you simply say, "I didn't do anything that I thought of as cheating, but today on test day I realized that I had an advantage that I wanted to inform you about," there is zero c…

Just feel I should point out this line (and nothing else! this is a volatile line of discussion, and I'm not aiming to perpetuate it):

>... there is zero chance of permanent consequences.

Bull. Faculty are just as petty and lazy (ie: human) as any other person. There are plenty of instances of teachers saving their own asses by lying enough to get away with it, and with them wielding their mighty tenure in unethical ways.

Damned if you do, damned if you don't, if you don't know the teacher very well. Odds are certainly on your side, heavily even, but it's far from "zero".

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