23 ms·

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

231 points by nano81 16y ago

gsivil 16y ago
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923931 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923931 was posted just yesterday
- nano81 16y ago
  Thanks - didn't see that
ghshephard 16y ago
Dupe.
- palish 16y ago
  Who cares? This is the first time I've seen it. All 4 current comments on this story are completely worthless.
  - cookiecaper 16y ago
    I found the link to the past discussion useful and the gratitude expressed for said link uplifting. :)
- ugh 16y ago
  That’s how you do that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1926525 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1926525
  - gsivil 16y ago
    can you please explain that for future use?
    - ugh 16y ago
      Referencing past submissions about the same topic, whether they are exactly the same or merely similar is very useful, especially if those past submissions contain discussions. You should always link to those past submissions and remain otherwise neutral (or positive if you like). It is not and cannot be the submitters duty to closely track Hacker News for all stories that have been submitted in the past [0]. Duplicates are inevitable, just writing “dupe” helps no one. Be constructive! [0] I’m not entirely sure whether the submitter should check the front page before submitting. Since a bookmarklet is officially endorsed and prominently linked I would rather think that checking the front page is no requirement. You should maybe only be careful and check the front page or the new page when you want to submit a story about an event that you know will be a hot topic on Hacker News (say, a Google press conference).
      - gsivil 16y ago
        As a new member in Hacker News I have thought of this problem a bit. I would like to know the opinion of the community. There are some pearls on the internet that even though can be old and maybe posted before(some months or years ago) they can be useful, interesting and even rekindle discussions where new ideas can be introduced. At the same time posting something that was discussed one two days ago and attracted attention(as you have pointed- I am not talking about the specific topic but in general) should be maybe linked to be fair with the original uploaders. And I agree that it is good practice at least to check at least the first page of Hacker News or the "news" section to avoid obvious duplicates .
      - merijnv 16y ago
        Actually, duplicate submissions for the exact same URL are counted as up votes for the first submission. So using the bookmarklet poses no problem. Using different URLs (thoughtcatalog vs youtube) for the same story causes difficulty, though.
gojomo 16y ago
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.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/21485811928/200-students-admit-to-cheating-exam-bigger-question-is-if-it-was-really-cheating-studying.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/21485811928/200-st... Now, it was probably common knowledge from prior semesters that this professor's exams were from the standard test bank. So those reviewing test bank questions may not have had pure motives in their study strategy. But it makes it less cut-and-dried, especially given that the students may have memorized (for example) 5 answers to potential questions for every 1 that happened to appear on the test. At some point, knowing all the answers to all potential questions is knowing the material... or else the whole idea of formulaic tests is bankrupt.
- gacek 16y ago
  I second that. Using the same questions for a couple of years and blaming the students that they learned the answer to those questions? questionable.
  - sid0 16y ago
    I guess an important question is whether this test bank is supposed to be accessible only to instructors. Presumably a test bank would contain enough questions for several tests, so it isn't necessary that there were any repeats from previous semesters.
    - cool-RR 16y ago
      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.
      - pohl 16y ago
jsolson 16y ago
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?
- riffraff 16y ago
  in all the universities I've seen in italy you always have access to the previous written exam tests for preparation. For the oral part, when teachers have repetitive behavior, I've often see people collect datasets and use them for studying. But the case seem different: the teacher in question actually took the tests from a given set and this set was known in advance. This is silly of the teacher, not of the students.
- robryan 16y ago
  Many classes I've taken know this yet still don't bother to change the questions. It actually skews the playing field towards those that have a lot of connections at the university as their more likely to have access to more past exams as many lecturers deliberately avoid placing them online so they can be lazy.
- melissamiranda 16y ago
  Dartmouth College and Stanford Business School classes did. We often had old tests to study from. Professors need to work harder and think up new questions each year!
- jules 16y ago
  It's exactly the same at Leiden University.
- oozcitak 16y ago
  It was the same in my university and every other university I know of. Previous exam questions are widely available for all popular courses. It would be foolish to think otherwise. What's to stop a student to write down questions after taking an exam and pass on to his juniors? Since this cannot be prevented, the faculty must assume that all students have all previous questions as part of their study material. Sometimes a professor knowingly reuses his old questions. In that case, the students should warn him: not for the professor, but for their own good. Because otherwise, they will be evaluated on less questions (since almost all students will answer old questions correctly whether they really know the subject or not). The students made only one mistake here, and it was taking that course from this particular professor.
kapitalx 16y ago
The students actually were asked to confess if they had seen the sample test before the example or not. They weren't confessing to actual cheating.
xentronium 16y ago
Scaring shit out of you since 1981. While it is generally true that good students should not cheat, but using questions from standard question bank was somewhat asking for it :) Nice and simple trick with distribution and disturbances, though.
dschobel 16y ago
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.
- sesqu 16y ago
  Of course, the test of confession doesn't have 100% confidence either. See for example the Innocence Project's page on this: http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/False-Confessions.php http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/False-Confessions...
- NHQ 16y ago
  Yeah if the cheating students took game theory courses as well, they would know that the best action would be to remain silent. Stupid students!
- ShabbyDoo 16y ago
  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!
srean 16y ago
I don't think it is really possible to keep a question bank secret. Some students tend to follow up with those who had taken the course last time, at least in my university. So if the question bank is voluminous enough, why not just make it open ? Whats the worst that can happen, people might go through it and learn all the solutions. Well, let them, that's the purpose of the course anyways. But the question bank cant so small that it does not explore the full diversity of problems. And no one is claiming that all questions will be from the question-bank, throw in a few off question-bank odd-balls each year. But how could they analyze the submissions to figure out (even approximately) who cheated who did not ? Apart from trawling their email and phone calls and wire taps that is....:-) I suspect part of the "forensics" was a bluff. I can only guess that there are a few problems in the set that historically have a low probability of being solved correctly. So whoever solved those can be marked suspicious. But a test will have only a few of those. But it sure sucks to be in a course where the instructor is unaware of the problem that QB is available and you are unwilling to look up the QB. Particularly where the QB was particularly designed for the top percentile.
- bhickey 16y ago
  > I suspect part of the "forensics" was a bluff. I agree. It sounds an awful lot like a bluff. While in college I worked as a teaching assistant, on a few occasions me and my staff identified cheaters. No one ever got caught by getting the right answer. Cheaters got caught when they had mistakes in common.
holdenc 16y ago
What the professor knows: - Some students had an advance copy of the test - The grade distribution indicates cheating What the professor doesn't know: - Who cheated Unless the university has access to a students network traffic proving they had access to the test, there's no way to be sure who cheated. The fact that the professor trudges through threats and vagaries for a full 15 minutes only seems to underscore this.
- eightbitman 16y ago
  Hey, at least he feels better now that he grandstanded and made himself feel like a big man catching so many bad little boys and girls.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- bdonlan 16y ago
  On the contrary - there's a few things they can do. They could examine the difference in results between the two tests at the individual-student level, for example. Or, using the set of students who admit to their cheating as a training set, do a question-level analysis.
  - PostOnce 16y ago
    Doesn't prove anything. Sometimes you don't get enough sleep and do poorly on a test. Sometimes you just have a great day. Using statistics as though they are hard facts and not merely suggestions of likelihood is a terrible idea when there is a question of guilt or innocence. I have in the past had wildly fluctuating grades. Don't believe everything your powerpoint-prettied software stats tell you.
    - 3pt14159 16y ago
      Does it 100% prove it? No. But what he can easily do is call up the top 200 most suspected students, get them to sit down in an office with nothing but a calculator and a pen and give them a very small subset of the original questions with the numbers changed. 20 people might be able to get them right, but a good 50 people arn't going to know where to start for any of the questions. Then all of a sudden it is "oh shit" time. If I were one of the "cheating" students I would come forward too. This actually happened when I was studying engineering at Waterloo. The course was calculus 3 and the prof, who normally taught math majors, didn't know that there was a university commissioned exam bank with previous exams for courses. Course coverage was sporadic for all but final exams, so we normally didn't check it, but the previous midterm was actually there. One of us found it 24 hours before the midterm, so half of us got it and half of us didn't. The prof had reused the hardest question. Long story short, nobody got in trouble, but the prof made it so your top and bottom "midterm" (there were 5 of them before the final) could be optional dropped together or not at all.
cool-RR 16y ago
What a petty man.
- AndyKelley 16y ago
  "The days of finding a new way to cheat the system are over." He's full of crap! He doesn't do any attempt at proving at all. He merely keeps threatening and intimidating, and the only thing he knows is that the numbers are suspicious.
RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
Previous submissions of the same story from various sources. They all have some discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1919562 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1919562 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922049 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922049 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922243 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922243 <- This has the most comments http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923931 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923931
brisance 16y ago
Outside of the United States, there are test standards called the GC(S)E "A" and "O" levels which are roughly equivalent to entrance exams for college/senior high respectively. Because these exams have been going on for DECADES, the examining body has basically given up on guarding these questions i.e. they are regarded to be in the "public domain". Enterprising publishers have called these collections of questions the "10 year series", which are exam questions from the previous decade. There is not a single person in this part of the world who does not own a copy when preparing for those exams.
rsobers 16y ago
This is definitely cheating, but there's an important lesson for the professor: if you care about cheating, don't be lazy. Write your own exam questions and change them often. You can tell that this is the most exciting event in this professor's life in the past 20 years. Maybe he should try varying his material.
CallMeV 16y ago
I just wish I could plusvote this one twice.
julius_geezer 16y ago
A close relative teaches in a continuing-ed masters program. The first two or three times she taught the class, the grades on the midterm were OK, but reasonably distributed. This fall, they were uniformly excellent. She concluded that the students had copies of her exams from previous semesters, and rewrote the final. As far as I know, it never occurred to her to tell the students off. Of course, these are twenty-somethings and probably a lot less susceptible to brow-beating.
reason 16y ago
The entire education system is essentially one big game, from the obscure admissions process to professors sticking to predetermined grading distributions; and these students are simply playing along.
ccomputinggeek 16y ago
For most courses the exams don't stray far from what's already been asked before. Competition between universities has made this problem a lot worse. Students choose courses with high pass rates and favorable grade ratios.
Hoff 16y ago
Your job as a teacher or as a presenter is to extend the available materials, and to provide me with insights that I might not gain from Googling existing materials. Not to prevent me from accessing the available materials. Not to control access to information. If what I am learning from your teachings and from your tests and from other students can be entirely replaced by Googling through test banks, then you're not helping me advance. If a presenter is reading off the slides? If you're not utilizing what is available, whether Google or Khan Academy or iTunes classes or otherwise, you're not helping me make connections. To think. To research. We see similar transitions arising in many human pursuits. In journalism. Booking travel. Financial markets. Programming. Music. And education. And in an earlier era of teaching, simply bringing calculators to a test. Don't make me memorize. Make me think. Make me research. It appears the professor has unwittingly also proved his teaching approach has failed.
- jeff95350 16y ago
  "Your job as a teacher or as a presenter is to extend the available materials" I'm puzzled by this. Let's say you teach basic physics or algebra... how are you supposed to "extend" the material, particularly testing material? I always thought the benefits of having a teacher were: 1. Human contact 2. Ability to answer arbitrary questions in an instant 3. Ability to adapt lectures to the audience 4. Students in the presence of a room full of other people trying to learn the same thing at the same time Those would all be great benefits even if the tests were all the same, administered in a standardized way, nationwide, by third-party proctors with third-party graders. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with independent study, online courses, or ad-hoc groups of students learning together. I just take issue with the idea that a teacher, in order to do their job, must also compose novel tests every year as though the new tests would somehow be better than all the other tests used over the years. If teaching honest students, it just doesn't sound like an efficient use of teaching resources to re-invent the wheel each time. And there are objective benefits to using the same or similar tests from year to year. One is that you can see if your class is improving or lagging in specific areas compared with previous classes. That could help you hone your teaching over the years. Wow, I tried playing this game to illustrate economics, and these students scored way higher on the arbitrage questions than the previous 5 years! Or: "gee, I thought that group project might be good, but the test scores dropped this year".
ltjohnson 16y ago
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 taking the exam at the same time, this makes it seem possible that the exam is online. If the exam is online, and the students can take it at home vs take it in a proctored room, that would change what would be cheating. If it were online at home (I don't think so from the video) then reviewing the test bank while taking the exam would be cheating. If not, then having seen a question before the exam may or may not be cheating, depending on HOW you saw the question. If you did not acquire questions in an unethical way, then it's not cheating, it's just studying. As an instructor, I will sometimes put problems from the book onto my exam. If the students worked the problems before because they were studying hard, then good for them! I want my students to study, because it will help them learn. I also provide a sample exam with previous exam questions on it; I write most of my own questions and it's important for students to get used to my style. As a student, I had to take a written exam for my PhD. When I was studying for the exam I asked Professors for help, one of my Professors gave me some of his questions. I worked out every single question. He also submitted one of his existing questions to the exam and I recognized it when I was taking the exam. Cheating? No. I just got lucky (and worked my ass off). If test questions are acquired by malicious means, or knowing that they are going to be on the exam, or are the test bank that is going to be used to make the exam. Then it is cheating. So if students knew that the questions came from a test bank, and downloaded the test bank (I'm sure it's on the web somewhere) to gain an advantage they cheated. Finally, as an instructor. Writing a decent exam is surprisingly hard. My goal with an exam is two-fold, figure out how well the class as a whole is doing, and separate the students into their grade groups. The ideal exam has some problems that even the D students can answer (to separate them from the F's) and some problems (usually just 1 problem) that are a stretch for the A students. And a mix of medium problems for everyone. If you have too many easy problems, the grades will creep up and you won't separate students. If you have too many hard problems, the grades will creep down and you won't separate students. Writing an exam from scratch is very time consuming. I use my private test bank, and try to add 1 or 2 new questions to the bank when I'm writing each exam. I can understand (but don't agree with) an instructor pulling entirely from an existing bank to write an exam.
ajays 16y ago
The solution, of course, is to have open-book, open-notes tests. Let the students bring any notes, books, etc.; anything but a communication device. The questions need to be novel and challenging enough so that the students who understand the material can walk out in no time; the students who don't, can sit around flipping through their notes. Of course, this approach requires the _professor_ to do a lot more work. (The few times I taught, I used this approach and always got rave or begrudging reviews). So really, I have no sympathy for this professor if he adopted the "security through obscurity" approach (as in, the problem set wouldn't be accessible to students). I don't blame the students for doing what they did; in real life, don't we expect employees to use whatever resources they can to solve problems?
- luker 16y ago
  Exactly. The best professor I ever had did exactly this and he was from India and dressed like a cowboy (not important but awesome). He posted a few previous semester's tests online. And he allowed us to bring whatever assignments, reference manuals, etc. (except for computers) into every test, but wrote a brand new test. I think this sort of thinking came about because he was just the kind of teacher that really cared that his students wanted to learn and it showed in the lab assignments and when he was actually giving lecture. This is when you know what learning is really about and you stop worrying about grades.
- ohashi 16y ago
  600 students in that course, that's one hell of a challenge.
jtchang 16y ago
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.
kleinmatic 16y ago
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."
- Aron 16y ago
  An additional penalty for confessing was having to take a 4 hour ethics course.
icco 16y ago
This disgusts me, but I totally believe it, as a college student seeing these kinds of numbers do not surprise me at all. Where I go to school though, the test is given at one hour on one day. The whole you have 52 hours to take the test thing. It seems like whoever takes it first could still help others study.
moo 16y ago
Students repeat courses, audit courses. Students can be exposed to these canned test questions in this way. Universities push the general learning experience in selling their education product. Those who want to make the student the commodity and control how they learn for better quality control strike me as dyed in the wool bureaucrats.
pmorici 16y ago
This guy seems like a crappy prof to me. He essentially got caught taking the lazy way out and is now acting surprised and trying to blame the students.
delinquentme 16y ago
Im sorry but this is the education system FAILING its students. 1. fear mongering by the prof " FORENSICE ANALYSIS" and "LEGAL ACTION" 2. the SAME test for the last FIVE years? 3. some crap sob story about "what were the last 20 years about" ... how about you being a lazy ass professor?
johnglasgow 16y ago
After being so upset with his cheating class, why does the professor offer a large time period to re-take the test? It seems like he is baiting the students to cheat again. Can't he set it during a normal class period where everyone takes it at once?
miurajose 16y ago
Those who cheated because they did not know the material will not do as well on the makeup. That is one way of finding out who cheated.
- bytesong 16y ago
  By your logic, those who did well on the original exam but could not do as well on the makeup because they happened to have a bad mood/health/etc. will also be qualified as cheaters. How does that make sense?
matthodan 16y ago
It was probably more work to memorize the test bank than to study the material as normal... It's ironic that those who memorized the test bank probably know the material best.
matthodan 16y ago
The prof's home page states: "Important Note: I have chosen not to participate in any social networking environments." http://www.bus.ucf.edu/rquinn/ http://www.bus.ucf.edu/rquinn/
runningdogx 16y ago
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 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.
sequoia 16y ago
"The consequences will never be the same!" ;)
meeee 16y ago
At my university usually all tests are published by the institutes themself on the iternet. They even advice you to train with the old exams. Some of them are also open book. But every exam is individual and so different (not only numbers changed) that you really have to train all the stuff to get a positive mark. Relying on "secret" question caches or buying questions from a third party is not very smart, lazy and really makes no sense to me. They did´nt cracked the system, they only used it for their belongings.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]

231 points by nano81 16y ago

gsivil 16y ago

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923931 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923931 was posted just yesterday

nano81 16y ago
Thanks - didn't see that

ghshephard 16y ago

Dupe.

palish 16y ago
Who cares? This is the first time I've seen it. All 4 current comments on this story are completely worthless.
- cookiecaper 16y ago
  I found the link to the past discussion useful and the gratitude expressed for said link uplifting. :)
ugh 16y ago
That’s how you do that: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1926525 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1926525
- gsivil 16y ago
  can you please explain that for future use?
  - ugh 16y ago
    Referencing past submissions about the same topic, whether they are exactly the same or merely similar is very useful, especially if those past submissions contain discussions. You should always link to those past submissions and remain otherwise neutral (or positive if you like). It is not and cannot be the submitters duty to closely track Hacker News for all stories that have been submitted in the past [0]. Duplicates are inevitable, just writing “dupe” helps no one. Be constructive! [0] I’m not entirely sure whether the submitter should check the front page before submitting. Since a bookmarklet is officially endorsed and prominently linked I would rather think that checking the front page is no requirement. You should maybe only be careful and check the front page or the new page when you want to submit a story about an event that you know will be a hot topic on Hacker News (say, a Google press conference).
    - gsivil 16y ago
      As a new member in Hacker News I have thought of this problem a bit. I would like to know the opinion of the community. There are some pearls on the internet that even though can be old and maybe posted before(some months or years ago) they can be useful, interesting and even rekindle discussions where new ideas can be introduced. At the same time posting something that was discussed one two days ago and attracted attention(as you have pointed- I am not talking about the specific topic but in general) should be maybe linked to be fair with the original uploaders. And I agree that it is good practice at least to check at least the first page of Hacker News or the "news" section to avoid obvious duplicates .
    - merijnv 16y ago
      Actually, duplicate submissions for the exact same URL are counted as up votes for the first submission. So using the bookmarklet poses no problem. Using different URLs (thoughtcatalog vs youtube) for the same story causes difficulty, though.

gojomo 16y ago

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.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/21485811928/200-students-admit-to-cheating-exam-bigger-question-is-if-it-was-really-cheating-studying.shtml http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/21485811928/200-st... Now, it was probably common knowledge from prior semesters that this professor's exams were from the standard test bank. So those reviewing test bank questions may not have had pure motives in their study strategy. But it makes it less cut-and-dried, especially given that the students may have memorized (for example) 5 answers to potential questions for every 1 that happened to appear on the test. At some point, knowing all the answers to all potential questions is knowing the material... or else the whole idea of formulaic tests is bankrupt.

gacek 16y ago
I second that. Using the same questions for a couple of years and blaming the students that they learned the answer to those questions? questionable.
- sid0 16y ago
  I guess an important question is whether this test bank is supposed to be accessible only to instructors. Presumably a test bank would contain enough questions for several tests, so it isn't necessary that there were any repeats from previous semesters.
  - cool-RR 16y ago
    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.
    - pohl 16y ago

jsolson 16y ago

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?

riffraff 16y ago
in all the universities I've seen in italy you always have access to the previous written exam tests for preparation. For the oral part, when teachers have repetitive behavior, I've often see people collect datasets and use them for studying. But the case seem different: the teacher in question actually took the tests from a given set and this set was known in advance. This is silly of the teacher, not of the students.
robryan 16y ago
Many classes I've taken know this yet still don't bother to change the questions. It actually skews the playing field towards those that have a lot of connections at the university as their more likely to have access to more past exams as many lecturers deliberately avoid placing them online so they can be lazy.
melissamiranda 16y ago
Dartmouth College and Stanford Business School classes did. We often had old tests to study from. Professors need to work harder and think up new questions each year!
jules 16y ago
It's exactly the same at Leiden University.
oozcitak 16y ago
It was the same in my university and every other university I know of. Previous exam questions are widely available for all popular courses. It would be foolish to think otherwise. What's to stop a student to write down questions after taking an exam and pass on to his juniors? Since this cannot be prevented, the faculty must assume that all students have all previous questions as part of their study material. Sometimes a professor knowingly reuses his old questions. In that case, the students should warn him: not for the professor, but for their own good. Because otherwise, they will be evaluated on less questions (since almost all students will answer old questions correctly whether they really know the subject or not). The students made only one mistake here, and it was taking that course from this particular professor.

kapitalx 16y ago

The students actually were asked to confess if they had seen the sample test before the example or not. They weren't confessing to actual cheating.

xentronium 16y ago

Scaring shit out of you since 1981. While it is generally true that good students should not cheat, but using questions from standard question bank was somewhat asking for it :) Nice and simple trick with distribution and disturbances, though.

dschobel 16y ago

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.

sesqu 16y ago
Of course, the test of confession doesn't have 100% confidence either. See for example the Innocence Project's page on this: http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/False-Confessions.php http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/False-Confessions...
NHQ 16y ago
Yeah if the cheating students took game theory courses as well, they would know that the best action would be to remain silent. Stupid students!
ShabbyDoo 16y ago
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!

srean 16y ago

I don't think it is really possible to keep a question bank secret. Some students tend to follow up with those who had taken the course last time, at least in my university. So if the question bank is voluminous enough, why not just make it open ? Whats the worst that can happen, people might go through it and learn all the solutions. Well, let them, that's the purpose of the course anyways. But the question bank cant so small that it does not explore the full diversity of problems. And no one is claiming that all questions will be from the question-bank, throw in a few off question-bank odd-balls each year. But how could they analyze the submissions to figure out (even approximately) who cheated who did not ? Apart from trawling their email and phone calls and wire taps that is....:-) I suspect part of the "forensics" was a bluff. I can only guess that there are a few problems in the set that historically have a low probability of being solved correctly. So whoever solved those can be marked suspicious. But a test will have only a few of those. But it sure sucks to be in a course where the instructor is unaware of the problem that QB is available and you are unwilling to look up the QB. Particularly where the QB was particularly designed for the top percentile.

bhickey 16y ago
> I suspect part of the "forensics" was a bluff. I agree. It sounds an awful lot like a bluff. While in college I worked as a teaching assistant, on a few occasions me and my staff identified cheaters. No one ever got caught by getting the right answer. Cheaters got caught when they had mistakes in common.

holdenc 16y ago

What the professor knows: - Some students had an advance copy of the test - The grade distribution indicates cheating What the professor doesn't know: - Who cheated Unless the university has access to a students network traffic proving they had access to the test, there's no way to be sure who cheated. The fact that the professor trudges through threats and vagaries for a full 15 minutes only seems to underscore this.

eightbitman 16y ago
Hey, at least he feels better now that he grandstanded and made himself feel like a big man catching so many bad little boys and girls.
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bdonlan 16y ago
On the contrary - there's a few things they can do. They could examine the difference in results between the two tests at the individual-student level, for example. Or, using the set of students who admit to their cheating as a training set, do a question-level analysis.
- PostOnce 16y ago
  Doesn't prove anything. Sometimes you don't get enough sleep and do poorly on a test. Sometimes you just have a great day. Using statistics as though they are hard facts and not merely suggestions of likelihood is a terrible idea when there is a question of guilt or innocence. I have in the past had wildly fluctuating grades. Don't believe everything your powerpoint-prettied software stats tell you.
  - 3pt14159 16y ago
    Does it 100% prove it? No. But what he can easily do is call up the top 200 most suspected students, get them to sit down in an office with nothing but a calculator and a pen and give them a very small subset of the original questions with the numbers changed. 20 people might be able to get them right, but a good 50 people arn't going to know where to start for any of the questions. Then all of a sudden it is "oh shit" time. If I were one of the "cheating" students I would come forward too. This actually happened when I was studying engineering at Waterloo. The course was calculus 3 and the prof, who normally taught math majors, didn't know that there was a university commissioned exam bank with previous exams for courses. Course coverage was sporadic for all but final exams, so we normally didn't check it, but the previous midterm was actually there. One of us found it 24 hours before the midterm, so half of us got it and half of us didn't. The prof had reused the hardest question. Long story short, nobody got in trouble, but the prof made it so your top and bottom "midterm" (there were 5 of them before the final) could be optional dropped together or not at all.

cool-RR 16y ago

What a petty man.

AndyKelley 16y ago
"The days of finding a new way to cheat the system are over." He's full of crap! He doesn't do any attempt at proving at all. He merely keeps threatening and intimidating, and the only thing he knows is that the numbers are suspicious.

RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago

Previous submissions of the same story from various sources. They all have some discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1919562 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1919562 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922049 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922049 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922243 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922243 <- This has the most comments http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923931 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923931

brisance 16y ago

Outside of the United States, there are test standards called the GC(S)E "A" and "O" levels which are roughly equivalent to entrance exams for college/senior high respectively. Because these exams have been going on for DECADES, the examining body has basically given up on guarding these questions i.e. they are regarded to be in the "public domain". Enterprising publishers have called these collections of questions the "10 year series", which are exam questions from the previous decade. There is not a single person in this part of the world who does not own a copy when preparing for those exams.

rsobers 16y ago

This is definitely cheating, but there's an important lesson for the professor: if you care about cheating, don't be lazy. Write your own exam questions and change them often. You can tell that this is the most exciting event in this professor's life in the past 20 years. Maybe he should try varying his material.

CallMeV 16y ago

I just wish I could plusvote this one twice.

julius_geezer 16y ago

A close relative teaches in a continuing-ed masters program. The first two or three times she taught the class, the grades on the midterm were OK, but reasonably distributed. This fall, they were uniformly excellent. She concluded that the students had copies of her exams from previous semesters, and rewrote the final. As far as I know, it never occurred to her to tell the students off. Of course, these are twenty-somethings and probably a lot less susceptible to brow-beating.

reason 16y ago

The entire education system is essentially one big game, from the obscure admissions process to professors sticking to predetermined grading distributions; and these students are simply playing along.

ccomputinggeek 16y ago

For most courses the exams don't stray far from what's already been asked before. Competition between universities has made this problem a lot worse. Students choose courses with high pass rates and favorable grade ratios.

Hoff 16y ago

Your job as a teacher or as a presenter is to extend the available materials, and to provide me with insights that I might not gain from Googling existing materials. Not to prevent me from accessing the available materials. Not to control access to information. If what I am learning from your teachings and from your tests and from other students can be entirely replaced by Googling through test banks, then you're not helping me advance. If a presenter is reading off the slides? If you're not utilizing what is available, whether Google or Khan Academy or iTunes classes or otherwise, you're not helping me make connections. To think. To research. We see similar transitions arising in many human pursuits. In journalism. Booking travel. Financial markets. Programming. Music. And education. And in an earlier era of teaching, simply bringing calculators to a test. Don't make me memorize. Make me think. Make me research. It appears the professor has unwittingly also proved his teaching approach has failed.

jeff95350 16y ago
"Your job as a teacher or as a presenter is to extend the available materials" I'm puzzled by this. Let's say you teach basic physics or algebra... how are you supposed to "extend" the material, particularly testing material? I always thought the benefits of having a teacher were: 1. Human contact 2. Ability to answer arbitrary questions in an instant 3. Ability to adapt lectures to the audience 4. Students in the presence of a room full of other people trying to learn the same thing at the same time Those would all be great benefits even if the tests were all the same, administered in a standardized way, nationwide, by third-party proctors with third-party graders. That's not to say that there's anything wrong with independent study, online courses, or ad-hoc groups of students learning together. I just take issue with the idea that a teacher, in order to do their job, must also compose novel tests every year as though the new tests would somehow be better than all the other tests used over the years. If teaching honest students, it just doesn't sound like an efficient use of teaching resources to re-invent the wheel each time. And there are objective benefits to using the same or similar tests from year to year. One is that you can see if your class is improving or lagging in specific areas compared with previous classes. That could help you hone your teaching over the years. Wow, I tried playing this game to illustrate economics, and these students scored way higher on the arbitrage questions than the previous 5 years! Or: "gee, I thought that group project might be good, but the test scores dropped this year".

ltjohnson 16y ago

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 taking the exam at the same time, this makes it seem possible that the exam is online. If the exam is online, and the students can take it at home vs take it in a proctored room, that would change what would be cheating. If it were online at home (I don't think so from the video) then reviewing the test bank while taking the exam would be cheating. If not, then having seen a question before the exam may or may not be cheating, depending on HOW you saw the question. If you did not acquire questions in an unethical way, then it's not cheating, it's just studying. As an instructor, I will sometimes put problems from the book onto my exam. If the students worked the problems before because they were studying hard, then good for them! I want my students to study, because it will help them learn. I also provide a sample exam with previous exam questions on it; I write most of my own questions and it's important for students to get used to my style. As a student, I had to take a written exam for my PhD. When I was studying for the exam I asked Professors for help, one of my Professors gave me some of his questions. I worked out every single question. He also submitted one of his existing questions to the exam and I recognized it when I was taking the exam. Cheating? No. I just got lucky (and worked my ass off). If test questions are acquired by malicious means, or knowing that they are going to be on the exam, or are the test bank that is going to be used to make the exam. Then it is cheating. So if students knew that the questions came from a test bank, and downloaded the test bank (I'm sure it's on the web somewhere) to gain an advantage they cheated. Finally, as an instructor. Writing a decent exam is surprisingly hard. My goal with an exam is two-fold, figure out how well the class as a whole is doing, and separate the students into their grade groups. The ideal exam has some problems that even the D students can answer (to separate them from the F's) and some problems (usually just 1 problem) that are a stretch for the A students. And a mix of medium problems for everyone. If you have too many easy problems, the grades will creep up and you won't separate students. If you have too many hard problems, the grades will creep down and you won't separate students. Writing an exam from scratch is very time consuming. I use my private test bank, and try to add 1 or 2 new questions to the bank when I'm writing each exam. I can understand (but don't agree with) an instructor pulling entirely from an existing bank to write an exam.

ajays 16y ago

The solution, of course, is to have open-book, open-notes tests. Let the students bring any notes, books, etc.; anything but a communication device. The questions need to be novel and challenging enough so that the students who understand the material can walk out in no time; the students who don't, can sit around flipping through their notes. Of course, this approach requires the _professor_ to do a lot more work. (The few times I taught, I used this approach and always got rave or begrudging reviews). So really, I have no sympathy for this professor if he adopted the "security through obscurity" approach (as in, the problem set wouldn't be accessible to students). I don't blame the students for doing what they did; in real life, don't we expect employees to use whatever resources they can to solve problems?

luker 16y ago
Exactly. The best professor I ever had did exactly this and he was from India and dressed like a cowboy (not important but awesome). He posted a few previous semester's tests online. And he allowed us to bring whatever assignments, reference manuals, etc. (except for computers) into every test, but wrote a brand new test. I think this sort of thinking came about because he was just the kind of teacher that really cared that his students wanted to learn and it showed in the lab assignments and when he was actually giving lecture. This is when you know what learning is really about and you stop worrying about grades.
ohashi 16y ago
600 students in that course, that's one hell of a challenge.

jtchang 16y ago

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.

kleinmatic 16y ago

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."

Aron 16y ago
An additional penalty for confessing was having to take a 4 hour ethics course.

icco 16y ago

This disgusts me, but I totally believe it, as a college student seeing these kinds of numbers do not surprise me at all. Where I go to school though, the test is given at one hour on one day. The whole you have 52 hours to take the test thing. It seems like whoever takes it first could still help others study.

moo 16y ago

Students repeat courses, audit courses. Students can be exposed to these canned test questions in this way. Universities push the general learning experience in selling their education product. Those who want to make the student the commodity and control how they learn for better quality control strike me as dyed in the wool bureaucrats.

pmorici 16y ago

This guy seems like a crappy prof to me. He essentially got caught taking the lazy way out and is now acting surprised and trying to blame the students.

delinquentme 16y ago

Im sorry but this is the education system FAILING its students. 1. fear mongering by the prof " FORENSICE ANALYSIS" and "LEGAL ACTION" 2. the SAME test for the last FIVE years? 3. some crap sob story about "what were the last 20 years about" ... how about you being a lazy ass professor?

johnglasgow 16y ago

After being so upset with his cheating class, why does the professor offer a large time period to re-take the test? It seems like he is baiting the students to cheat again. Can't he set it during a normal class period where everyone takes it at once?

miurajose 16y ago

Those who cheated because they did not know the material will not do as well on the makeup. That is one way of finding out who cheated.

bytesong 16y ago
By your logic, those who did well on the original exam but could not do as well on the makeup because they happened to have a bad mood/health/etc. will also be qualified as cheaters. How does that make sense?

matthodan 16y ago

It was probably more work to memorize the test bank than to study the material as normal... It's ironic that those who memorized the test bank probably know the material best.

matthodan 16y ago

The prof's home page states: "Important Note: I have chosen not to participate in any social networking environments." http://www.bus.ucf.edu/rquinn/ http://www.bus.ucf.edu/rquinn/

runningdogx 16y ago

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 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.

sequoia 16y ago

"The consequences will never be the same!" ;)

meeee 16y ago

At my university usually all tests are published by the institutes themself on the iternet. They even advice you to train with the old exams. Some of them are also open book. But every exam is individual and so different (not only numbers changed) that you really have to train all the stuff to get a positive mark. Relying on "secret" question caches or buying questions from a third party is not very smart, lazy and really makes no sense to me. They did´nt cracked the system, they only used it for their belongings.

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