It’s because Randy Seltzer is absolutely right. The professor was bluffing on being able to identify the cheaters.
Good bluff, though - he got 200 students, which is about what his distribution estimated.
Is there a possibility that the good professor wanted those two hundred and so forth students to be expelled, and the University said nope, one or two fine, but not 200 and change, and this was the lesser evil response.
Declan
What a second.
Now the test banks are AVAILABLE TO THE PUBLIC. Right? If someone prepares for the exam by studying questions from the test bank, you cannot call that cheating.
That fact that the questions CAME DIRECTLY FROM THE TEST BANKS, is very problematic, and now gives an advantage to students preparing by using the test banks. But, you can not fault the student, but the test giver.
Now if someone distributed the actual test itself prior to the exam, well, that’s definitely cheating.
If this is a class for business students, shouldn’t the ones that cheated get an A?
If the students really thought it was okay to study from the test banks, they would have had no problem discussing that openly with the prof. Profs get tons of questions before exams, and they are more than willing to discuss effective study strategies. The correct thing to do would be to say “We know from previous classes that you use Test Bank XYZ in preparing for your exams. Should we work from that?”
But the students didn’t do that. They skulked around passing information out in secret. Even the person who called the whole thing out did it anonymously. Why? If everyone thought it was perfectly okay, why the secrecy?
Because they knew what they were doing was shady. They new perfectly well that they were trying to get an unfair advantage. They knew that if the professor knew what they were doing, he would change the test. So they tried to keep it a secret. That’s all there is to it. If you are doing something for a class that you know is shady, that’s cheating. If you have a genuine borderline situation, it is your responsibility to discuss it openly with the professor and seek clarification. It’s like a marriage. Your job in a marriage is to be honest and open, and to discuss any situations that might make your spouse uncomfortable because you are all working together towards a common goal. If you are skulking around, doing stuff in secret, and justifying it to yourself in retrospect, then you are doing it wrong.
Remember, the professor is your guide. He is not your rival in a battle of wits. He is not an adversary to beat and outsmart.He is the person who is responsible for teaching you something, and has set up a system that he thinks will lead to that. You guys are partners in this whole “learning something” adventure. If you’ve found a loophole or a way around it, it’s your job to inform him so that he can rethink his teaching strategy and you stand a better chance of mastering the material.
What you don’t do is take advantage of that loophole and then whine when you get caught. Nobody said anything about trying to change the system until after they got caught. They were perfectly fine- perhaps even preferred- the test banks until they got caught. If they hadn’t have got caught, they probably would have never alerted the prof that the Test Banks were not secure, or otherwise tried to fix the problem.
Frankly this whole situation has disturbed me a lot. I’ve read a lot of the commentary, and it’s shocking how many people are willing to blame the prof and absolve the cheaters. Is this where we are a as a society? Don’t we have a little basic integrity left? I mean, it doesn’t even make sense to cheat on a college level…the whole goal is to actually learn the material, nobody gives a damn about your grades. Cheating in college is kind of like cheating at the gym…sure, you could write down that you ran twenty laps when you actually ran five, but that’d just be stupid.
In Graduate B-School, some students in my class were preparing for a test by a professor in what they thought was an intelligent manner. They got access to his tests from the university where he previously taught - the tests were on file at the library there and were freely accessible to the public. When the exam day came, they (about 4 or so) sat down and saw the test was almost identical to the one they had seen before. They shared a couple of glances with one another and then walked up to the front of the class, asked the prof to step into the hallway, and told him the deal. He said it was fine - they were public documents and the students showed they were being thorough in their preparation - but he didn’t recycle tests from his old school any more.
I don’t think it’s at all poor form for the professor to use a professional test bank for this kind of class. With 600 students, you pretty much have to have multiple choice tests, and if you do, professional test banks almost certainly have better questions than the ones the professor might write. It’s difficult to write good multiple choice questions. More than anything, they really need multiple sets of eyes to look at them to make sure their aren’t ambiguities and that what you think you are testing is really what you are testing. It is a skill that is totally separate from the skills that make a good teacher. Using the professional test bank is almost certainly crafting a more fair, more valid test than any similar test the professor could write.
Now, essay or short answer tests are often better written by the professor because they tend to know more what they are looking for, and because any ambiguity in the question can be managed by the answer (i.e., if I write a bad essay question that can be read 2 different ways, I can grade either possible approach on its own merits).
If the exam questions are publicly available, and the students did not have any inside information on exactly which questions would be in the exam, I would not consider it cheating. Most of my professors even encouraged the students to use their old exams as a learning aid. They did not blatantly recycle questions usually, but quite some questions were asked in a similar form in older exams, so those were usually pretty helpful.
If they had inside information on exactly which questions would be asked, I would consider it cheating.
In one oral exam I knew from a previous student what the professor had asked her, and so I learned those things as well. I did not know wheter he would ask me the same things, but it turned out my exam was about 3/4 the same as the exam of that earlier student. I did not tell the professor that I had heard those questions before. Does that mean that I cheated?
I don’t see a lot of absolving the cheaters - but I do blame the prof.
To employ a frequently used analogy, he’s walking around bad neighborhoods with a wheelbarrow overflowing with loose cash and turning his back on it every so often to check out the scenery. They shouldn’t have cheated. The ones who cheated should be failed, expelled, whatever the school does with cheaters. But given the environment that he created, I’m not surprised at all that it happened.
Like Barrett Bonden, I am disappointed by the outcome of this. I have never been faced with wholesale cheating, but I have turned individual cheaters over to the dean and failed them out of my classes. I’ve taught at three different colleges, and all three had explicit ethical rules which the students were honor-bound to follow and I was honor-bound to enforce.
Statistically, you could not demonstrate with 100% certainty that someone did cheat. As the prof said, you could make a list almost guaranteed to have all of the cheater’s names on it, but it would be very likely to catch innocent students as well. I see your point, DJD90065, but there really wasn’t much choice other than forcing everyone to take a new midterm.
However, I really don’t think the students who admitted to cheating should have been allowed to keep their grade on the new midterm. At the very least, they should have taken a penalty (e.g., knock all scores down by a grade level or two). Had this been my class, the ones who admitted to cheating would have had zeroes on that test. Period.
As for the test question bank, I have mixed feelings. Good tests are very hard to write. When I began teaching, it was common for at least one of my questions to be challenged by the students as ambiguous after they took the test. I would have to throw out that question or give credit for one of the answers I had originally perceived as wrong. Over time, you develop a list of good question/answer sets. You also get better at writing tests. Some subject matter changes pretty quickly. You couldn’t get away with 10- or 20-year-old questions on your exams. If the prof wrote his own tests every year, as I always did, it would take up a lot of his time–especially with 200 questions per exam (mine were never that big). If he had TAs do it, the quality of the exam would suffer. So test banks have their place.
I disagree strongly with deanc2000, who claims the prof is at fault for using a test bank, and the students who took advantage of it can’t be blamed. Of course they can be blamed. They demonstrated a lack of ethics that would greatly concern me as a potential future employer. We’re not talking about immature grade school students that treat school as a game. We’re talking about college students whose code of personal conduct should be pretty well determined by then. I wouldn’t want these 200 students as my employees or coworkers, and I definitely wouldn’t want one of them for a boss. They simply can’t be trusted.
The difference is that “bad neighborhood” is actually an academic community that people actually work hard and pay lots of money to be a part of. So stealing it is not like stealing from a stranger- it’s more like stealing from a business partner or family member that is trying to make your life better. And that “wheelbarrow” full of cash is actually knowledge that presumably the students are interested in knowing, and “stealing” it is actually pretty useless…so we’ll say it’s like a wheelbarrow full of cash that is only useful in the final destination, just like knowledge is only useful to students in their long-term memory. You can steal what you like, but in the end it won’t make you richer.
A university is not a prison break room. If students cannot show some basic integrity, then something is wrong on a very fundamental level.
Bullshit. You don’t punish innocent people for the misdeeds of others. Anyone who admitted to or can be proven to have cheated should be punished, but forcing students who didn’t cheat to retake the exam is not serving justice.
At the end of the video, did anyone notice that the prof said he’d been so consumed by the cheating that he didn’t have time to load the slides for that week’s lesson? So the honest students are getting doubly screwed. They paid their tuition for a certain number of classes. Doesn’t the professor have an obligation to come to class prepared to teach?
“The days of being able to find new ways to cheat the system are over.”
LOL. This guy considers himself an expert on business management? There is no end to the possible new ways to cheat the system.
Since when is studying from publicly available sources cheating? Ethics blah blah blah, by studying their prof they got an insight into where he got exam questions, studied it and did well.
I am in sales, I often do well by knowing my client, his strengths and weaknesses - so now this is not allowed?
Also, to Casdave, no matter how well prepared I am, if I find out something (legal) that is going to help I am damn well going to use it. If that happens to be a past student, another text he has written, or the public test bank where he gets his questions, then more power to me for finding out.
Chill, dude! Deep breath!
I agree with the sentiment that the ones who didn’t cheat shouldn’t be punished. But how else can you come up with clean results for that midterm?
The test bank wasn’t “publicly available.” It was stolen. There’s a difference.
Good parallel. Let’s explore it. In class, you study the subject matter. In sales, you study the client. Read up on the company and the individual. You’ll do well.
But what these students did is the equivalent of breaking into his office and going through his files, or perhaps stealing his mail. That’s not ethical.
It’s the best he could do. He ran a bluff; there’s no way that he could distinguish someone who earned a 90 (for example) from someone who got the 90 by using the test bank. The ones who folded under the bluff will get spanked. I personally think that if they confess to cheating, they should be thanked for their belated effort at honesty and suspended for the remainder of the semester, if not expelled outright.
However, what he did do is level the playing field. Yes, the ones who didn’t cheat have to take the test again, but this time they’re not being penalized by the ones who cheated. And the ones who cheated will pay the price by getting a lower score on the test and having to sit through the ethics class, where they might actually learn something about honor and integrity.
If I were a non-cheater, I wouldn’t be thrilled about having to take the test again, but I’d be pissed at the cheaters, not at the prof. He did the right thing. He could have just let it slide; he didn’t. He’s trying to make it fair for everyone and he has reinforced the concept that behavior like that is unacceptable.
Not a perfect solution, but a workable one.
UCF grad here.
It’s an undergraduate class in Strategic Management. If the students learned anything at all in the class, it’s a win, frankly.
The real lesson is that there’s only one way to get your university in the news: do something stupid. The only other time I’ve seen my beloved alma mater on CNN was when we tied a guy to a tree outside a sorority house and he got arrested.
(Bolding mine.)
That’s a nice ideal, but the reality is that many people do in fact give a damn about your grades. Off the top of my head: scholarship committees, graduate schools, and certain employers are going to look at GPA as a selection criterion.
Not that I advocate cheating or anything, but the right call would be to deny you took part of it right? Seems like the best they can do is get one or two people for distributing the list.