4 ms·

I took a physics exam once where we had studied previous years exams and the test was essentially questions from those tests. Needless to say, that exam went f

I took a physics exam once where we had studied previous years exams and the test was essentially questions from those tests. Needless to say, that exam went fine, but it felt very weird. We weren't cheating, the exams were publicly available on the college's website, but the professor clearly didn't know that. The idea that you can reuse an exam multiple times especially in the science is just over. It sucks, but it's the truth. The same is becoming true of interview questions.

xilun0 16y ago
"just" over? and why especially in science? I'm remember as soon as in middle/junior high school ("collège" in France, I believe equivalent to US grades 6 to 9), which i started in 1993, and continuing throughout high school and then superior studies (maybe excluding "classes préparatoires", which are notoriously very hard), it was well-known that _some_ teachers used to recycle their exams from previous years. And we had no need to use information tech to find somebody able to provide us both questions and answers. It did not happened a lot, but we definitely did so a few times, transmitting the informations in very small group of very close students. We occasionally heard about other small groups having had access to the exam prior to taking it (because it was recycled, not by stealing it) while we were not aware of it available too. I'm pretty sure it _always_ happens when a teacher recycle its own exams or only construct it using open or quasi-open content always from the same source. It was felt by pretty much every student as "fair game", taking advantage of teacher laziness. In retrospect it was clearly a form of cheating, but a kind of light cheating not as hard as e.g. getting the answers in the exam room, and also I would not put all the blame on the students (well it's hard to blame himself, so I'm biased on this)... Also it would have astonished me to see an exam canceled because of that, because the teacher would clearly be shown as lazy and sharing a huge part of responsibility.

xilun0 16y ago

"just" over? and why especially in science? I'm remember as soon as in middle/junior high school ("collège" in France, I believe equivalent to US grades 6 to 9), which i started in 1993, and continuing throughout high school and then superior studies (maybe excluding "classes préparatoires", which are notoriously very hard), it was well-known that _some_ teachers used to recycle their exams from previous years. And we had no need to use information tech to find somebody able to provide us both questions and answers. It did not happened a lot, but we definitely did so a few times, transmitting the informations in very small group of very close students. We occasionally heard about other small groups having had access to the exam prior to taking it (because it was recycled, not by stealing it) while we were not aware of it available too. I'm pretty sure it _always_ happens when a teacher recycle its own exams or only construct it using open or quasi-open content always from the same source. It was felt by pretty much every student as "fair game", taking advantage of teacher laziness. In retrospect it was clearly a form of cheating, but a kind of light cheating not as hard as e.g. getting the answers in the exam room, and also I would not put all the blame on the students (well it's hard to blame himself, so I'm biased on this)... Also it would have astonished me to see an exam canceled because of that, because the teacher would clearly be shown as lazy and sharing a huge part of responsibility.