25 ms·

Am I the Unethical One?

• booleandilemma 3y ago
  A teacher at my university was fired for failing students who were caught cheating in an introductory CS class. The ones in charge didn't like that he was causing a disturbance. They would rather have had the cheaters get away with it. The system is broken.
  • butterNaN 3y ago
    That is indeed some disproportionate reaction to just failing some students in introductory CS class. (So much that I feel there must be more to the story.) > The system is broken This is truer than it sounds. The very design of Examinations itself is broken in most places. It shouldn't be possible by design to cheat in my opinion. "Open-book" exams are harder to set, but I think the whole cheating-prevention infrastructure is harder, costlier, and pointless.
    • okennedy 3y ago
      Even open book exams can be gamed. There are whole industries set up around enabling in-exam communication (e.g. concealed subvocal mics/headphones) and outsourcing schoolwork. It is definitely possible to design assessments on which cheating is difficult. For example, oral examinations or personalized per-student projects or exams. The problem is that this style of personalized assessment fundamentally does not scale past a few dozen students in a classroom. You want a classroom that small, it's going to cost you. Just instructor salaries for would run each student 10-30k per year, and that's before paying for infrastructure (classrooms, tech, offices) and (admittedly not always useful) administration.
      • butterNaN 3y ago
        > Even open book exams can be gamed Of course, yes, nothing's perfect. But Open book exams are far better bargain than what the most popular method of exams is as of today.
        • warkdarrior 3y ago
          Would "open book" include access to Google search and to ChatGPT?
      • OkayPhysicist 3y ago
        Smaller class sizes is definitely a huge boon for everybody involved. I went to a mid-sized private uni, where a large class size was maybe in the low 30 students range, and many were closer to 10-15, and the experience was dramatically better than my friends at other universities got. Professors knew the vast majority of us by name, and had at least an approximate idea of your grasp on the course material. Cheating was solved with a pretty straightforward approach: don't make it trivial to cheat (re-using test questions, question-bank multiple choice tests, etc) to keep the honest students honest, then trust the students. If someone's caught violating that trust, send them to the business school. (I don't know what they did with cheaters in the business school. I assume promote them)
    • zvolsky 3y ago
      Our best computer networks teacher from secondary school decided to leave following complaints from parents, who believed that the tests were too difficult. As I remember, about 3/4 of our class had a tough time. Honestly, the tests weren't all that hard. I suspect there was some crowd effect taking place, which resulted in people collectively giving up. This turned out to be a significant blow to the standard of our education. The subsequent teachers were neither as knowledgeable, nor as effective in teaching the subjects.
  • asoneth 3y ago
    > The system is broken. That may be university-by-university thing. I briefly managed an academic department at an old, highly-ranked university. Professors regularly caught cheaters and there was never any question that they would fail the course. The only question was whether the incident was mild enough that they would be permitted to try again next semester or severe enough to leave the university. The administration supported us 100% as this was seen as essential to defending the value of the degree conferred on the other students. Without some kind of standards we'd eventually become just another degree mill. What surprised me most was how many students who never finished the degree (not just cheating -- some just got job offers and decided not to stick around) still listed the degree on their resume/CV. The problem is that many companies now call the school to check as part of their hiring process, and the school would inform them that they had enrolled but had not been granted the degree. In retrospect I wish I had instituted a policy of letting the ex-student know in those cases, because I'm not sure if hiring companies tell them and I wonder how many people think they're just unlucky or something.
    • beambot 3y ago
      Faked degrees happen all the time, sometimes in very prominent circumstances. E.g. > MIT Admissions Dean Resigns After Fake Degrees Come to Light https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/4/26/mit-admissions-dean-resigns-after-fake/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2007/4/26/mit-admissions-...
  • denton-scratch 3y ago
    I once worked as a part-time visiting lecturer in CS. I routinely got assignments handed-in that students had evidently copied from one-another. More than half of the students were handing in copied work. In at least one case, they hadn't even botherd to change the name at the top. Usually they had the sense to change variable- and function-names, but not always. As a newbie lecturer, I asked my colleagues what to do. They said: "You can fail them. You'll be accused of racism (most of the students were brown-skinned). They will appeal; you'll then have to sit on exam boards through the summer, which is unpaid for a visting P/T lecturer. There's a good chance the school will overrule you, because these are paying overseas students." "Or you can tell them that you've noticed the 'sharing' that's been going on; that collaboration and sharing is encouraged, but that they must never do it in marked assignments." I adopted the latter course of action. Being a part-time visiting lecturer is a crap job.
    • sebzim4500 3y ago
      Honestly if people are working together to do assignments that's not the end of the world. IMO you probably learn more doing it that way. If people are selling answers that's a different story, but that's what in person exams are for.
    • johnny99k 3y ago
      I remember when I was taking software development classes in 2003/4, when I was finishing my computer science degree. I helped a buddy of mine out on one of the projects by basically writing it for him. I re-wrote my project in a completely different style. We both got 100%. If you are going to cheat, do it right and actually show some imagination and creativity.
      • ourmandave 3y ago
        Once AI starts grading papers you'll have to be more clever than that. Like re-code your project in another language and then back again.
        • g_sch 3y ago
• WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
  Kinda reminds me how Genius proved Google was scraping lyrics from them. Cannot find for the life of me what could be possibly unethical about this. If anything, it’s very, very educational.
  • ziml77 3y ago
    Also seems fine to me. I'm not even sure why anyone would be defending the cheaters by making this out to be unethical.
  • segh 3y ago
    Reminiscent of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
  • contravariant 3y ago
    It's a decent exercise in ethics to point out what could be unethical about it. If you only consider the goal (catching cheaters) it's easy to convince yourself it can't possibly be unethical, but you shouldn't disregard the methods. - Publishing wrong answers to a previous exam could confuse students who were simply looking up old exams to study. - Identifying 'cheaters' as anyone who had a less than 1% chance of arriving at the answers randomly. This is wrong for 2 reasons, one is that they aren't answering randomly the other is that even assuming they are answering randomly you'd falsely accuse at least 1 student of wrongdoing on average. - Not sure if a teacher has a moral duty to make good tests, but if they do then reusing multiple choice questions on a complex topic like ethics isn't ideal.
    • WesolyKubeczek 3y ago
      > - Publishing wrong answers to a previous exam could confuse students who were simply looking up old exams to study. In any decent institution which does exams, an example exam sheet with questions similar to what you’re going to get, or even one of actual old exams, is usually published for just this purpose. Sniffing around the sites the express (or commonly agreed upon) purpose of which is enablement of cheating, on the other hand, reveals the intent. So, nope.
• neilv 3y ago
  I once wanted to be a university professor. Stories of rampant cheating at some schools make me think it would've had to have been somewhere with a more honorable culture. I've heard of some schools where supposedly the students take the honor code very seriously.
  • tombert 3y ago
    If you have at least a masters degree (bachelors in some states), it's not terribly difficult to get an adjunct lecturer job. You're generally committed for a whole semester, but that's basically it.
• Aulig 3y ago
  I guess it depends on how obviously wrong the given answers were. At my university it was allowed and encouraged to practice for exams using old exams. I could see someone having studied that way and assuming the fake answers must be correct.
  • batch12 3y ago
    Nah, the professor isn't in the wrong. A study guide was provided, the school disallows looking at other tests, and he told the students not to cheat-- and the consequences. I don't agree that there is nuance here.
• red_trumpet 3y ago
  > When he confronted those students about this, most of them admitted they had cheated; the consequences for their grades are still being determined > I tell all my students what will happen if I catch them cheating How do those two statements go together?
  • gapan 3y ago
    "If you get caught cheating, there will be serious consequences, ranging from X to Y. The decision will be made by the board together with the ethics committee."
  • jpk2f2 3y ago
    Typically the university itself handles consequences for cheating, plagiarism, etc. Repeated issues often leads to the student being expelled.
• aqme28 3y ago
  Is it cheating to study off of past exams? I really don't understand the professor's perspective here.
  • docdeek 3y ago
    I think there’s a difference between looking at an old exam and its answers, figuring out why each was right and wrong, and learning from it, and just finding an exam online and using the answer key as your answer in a test because you couldn’t be bothered learning.
    • strken 3y ago
      The interesting part here is that at least some of the students might have thought it was an old exam from the same course, used it for studying, learned totally nonsensical answers, and then gotten confused in the actual final. Evidently not all of them straight-up copied the answers, or they would have gotten much higher scores. This is apparently still a violation of his institution's academic honesty policy, but there are interesting questions about what happens if he e.g. poisoned one member of a study group who went on to teach bullshit to the other members, giving them a higher chance of picking the wrong answers and putting them over the threshold without ever knowingly cheating. Of course this is irrelevant, as the p<0.01 test gives an up to 62%[0] chance that someone in his class of 96 students could be falsely accused of cheating, and is unethical in itself. Apparently one student managed to be right on the threshold, which the professor has chosen to interpret as "the student possibly cheating" rather than "me possibly ruining my student's academic life for no reason by choosing a test with lots of false positives and applying it to a class of 96 students". [0] 1-(0.99^96), and though the real chance is probably a lot lower if the questions are obviously wrong, it's still a stupid threshold to choose
  • ziml77 3y ago
    To some extent yes. By studying the exams, you're learning how to answer the test questions instead of actually understanding the material. And what is definitely cheating is to search for past exams while you have the current exam in hand and start copying down answers.
• neilv 3y ago
  > who recently caught 40 of the 96 students [...] cheating That 40 is reported suspected, by one individual. The same individual claims that only 2/3 of those were admitted at time of writing. Also, suspicion was by only a 1:100 coincidence probability standard of evidence, and by some imperfect metric. IMHO, that threshold would be too low to "prove" guilt in such a potentially serious matter (negative mark on student record, reputational damage among college social and professional networking peers, and potentially including suspension or expulsion).
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • masfuerte 3y ago
    He says that only one student was at roughly the hundred to one level, so he thought that one might be honest. The rest were at the billion to one level.
    • 6D794163636F756 3y ago
      He also said that he is talking to others about what he should do. It seems like he very sensibly is using this as a starting point rather than accepting his work as the final verdict
  • ajross 3y ago
    > Also, suspicion was by only a 1:100 coincidence probability standard of evidence, and by some imperfect metric. ...only? In a sample size of 96, what's the value in analysis beyond that level? No, this seems pretty solid to me. The math to do this is routine freshman statistics stuff, something every practicing scientist knows. The assumptions just require that wrong answers be roughly evenly distributed across the choices (e.g. you could construct a test where everyone who was wrong would be led to choice C and rarely B or D, but that's a little pathological; and regardless it's something that would be evident in the data set and seems not to have been). I mean, standards vary but I'll bet in most jurisdictions 100:1 odds count as "beyond a reasonable doubt" for jury instructions in criminal trials. At the very least you'd bring the trial, which is what happened here. If I know there's only a 1% chance I'm wrong, it's absolutely valid for me to accuse you of cheating.
• tgv 3y ago
  I'd rather avoid the question about ethics in this case. Is it ethical to accept payment for teaching? Is it ethical to charge as much for as (some of) US univerities do? Is it ethical to devise a test in such a way that a number of students will certainly fail? Is it ethical to prevent students from cheating? You can bend the word just as long until it means something like "might it cause any harm at all?" But if you ask yourself: why do the students take this course, you can think the reason is to learn something. If they want a piece of paper that proves that, they can't cheat. If you --cynically-- assume that students only take the course to get their diploma with as little effort as possible, then cheating is allowed. As long as schools want to teach something, they should stay away from online or take-home exams and essays. If they want something else (and usually the motivator here is money), the value of their education will drop.
• neilv 3y ago
  > in his online Introduction to Ethics course cheating on a take-home final exam. Sounds funny that an ethics class gets heavy cheating. But it might be a required or elective course that students don't take seriously, or it might be disproportionately Philosophy majors (which major might get more than their share of frosh starting to wield off-the-wall ethical rationalizations).
  • batch12 3y ago
    > Sounds funny that an ethics class gets heavy cheating. Good observation - got me thinking. I see lots of suggestions here about requiring ethics training/classes for developers, so it made me wonder-- can ethics be effectively trained into a person predisposed to behave unethically if consequences for the behavior don't exist? Edited for clarity and moved under the right comment
    • neilv 3y ago
      One problem doing this for tech is that we've normalized so much bad behavior. For example, go back 30 years, and make ordinary software spy on its users, or otherwise act against users' interests, and I think you'd be seen as evil and possibly criminal. One promising thing, though, is that college students might still be be more open to confronting issues of ethics and morality. (Though often it's only "Revolutionaries till graduation", because of sheltered circumstances or social fashion.) But college is a bit late, and students are already being driven to mercenary behavior by e.g., competition for FAANG jobs (like I used to mainly hear about desperate/ruthless behavior by some pre-meds). Ideally, we teach better values from early age, including by example.
    • denton-scratch 3y ago
      > can ethics be effectively trained into a person Maybe. But that's not what an ethics class is for; it's for learning about ethics, it's not for learning how to be ethical.
• hartator 3y ago
  > I decided to ‘poison the well’ by uploading [to Quizlet] a copy of my final with wrong answers. (The final is 70-80 questions, all multiple choice, 5 options each.) Most of these answers were not just wrong, but obviously wrong to anyone who had paid attention in class. My thinking was that anyone who gave a sufficient number of those same answers would be exposing themselves, not only as someone who cheated by looking up the final online, but who didn’t even pay enough attention in class to notice how wrong the answers were. I think that’s reasonable. I would even consider expelling students who did this; specially in college, specially in an ethics course.
• PopGreene 3y ago
  I had a prof that did something like this. It was back in the 80s, so no internet. Instead, because it was a large class, he had to give the mid-terms to different parts of the class. He would make all the tests look similar, but with small differences. If the right wrong answers turned up, he would fail the student. (I hope that makes sense.) At the end of the semester, he explained what was going on. The course was required for the degree (EE), you had to have a C or above to pass, and it was a bear. He said right out, the course was designed to cull the heard. A few students were outraged. I'm not surprised by the reaction Merriam got. Speaking for myself, I was indifferent to what he had done, though I didn't speak up. I think he should ask the students that he determined hadn't cheated what they think.
  • robochat 3y ago
    This feels harsh because if the tests were similar but with small differences then getting the right wrong answers seems likely to happen anyway. Also, he went the extra step and outright failed the student but I'm not sure why that extra step was justified, surely the cheaters were automatically going to get very poor marks.
  • phkahler 3y ago
    >> He said right out, the course was designed to cull the heard. That seems unethical too. Students are paying to learn material. Professors are ostensibly there to teach it. Making it extra hard seems to go against that.
• catapart 3y ago
  Are you trying to teach kids to not cheat? Or are you trying to teach them how to conceptualize, illustrate (if not demonstrate), and structure ethics such that they can make critical and thoughtful deductions or contributions to the field? Because, if it's the former: great job, Ranger Rick. You definitely used a method that will root out cheaters and give them some (small/limited) incentive not to cheat anymore. But, if it's the latter, you've failed your students in every respect. It's not even a clean example of the ethics of cheating, because you've tipped the scales in ways that affect multiple variables, instead of just one. Neither of which is ethical or unethical in the vacuums of consideration that any subject remains neutral in. But if the context is that it's a philosophy class, I would expect the teacher teach me philosophical ethics and let the chaff fall where it may, rather than try to "prove" some nebulous idea of what it means to "know" something, and why one method of being able to 'prove' it is inferior to some other method. Put simply: I'm in this class to learn. If you're giving me the information and then I pass the test, that's your entire responsibility. Whatever third parties are doing - so long as it's not infringing on you - is not relevant. Not to your class and my grades. Sorry you're one of THOSE teachers, but learning isn't a test. It's a lifelong pursuit and you can't force people to pursue what they're A) not interested in or B) deft enough to use digital memory for.
  • sanderjd 3y ago
    I think both? At least, when I was in school, I thought one of the first-order lessons they were trying to teach us was to not cheat, while also teaching us other things.
    • catapart 3y ago
      Yeah, but WHY would they want to teach you not to cheat? It's not a virtue, in and of itself (cheating has to be defined for each context it's in so "don't cheat" is like saying "don't be bad"). They teach you not to cheat because if you cheat, you won't know the answer when you need it. If you're a doctor, and don't know the answer to a question when you need it, you might kill someone. A lawyer has problems there, too. There are great values in keeping people from relying on deferred knowledge, in a great many applications. I just don't see how philosophical ethics - especially not a mid-level course - benefits from those same lessons/limitations. If a software developer isn't expected to know every language pattern; only how to look up the patterns they need, when they need them, then why would then be disallowed from doing that on a test? A better test would target different metrics than "correct answer" or "incorrect answer". The same thing applies here. You can do software dev without being able to pass an "internal knowledge only" test. You can be productive with ethical philosophy without being able to pass an "internal knowledge only" test. So yes, both is the goal. What I'm getting at is that both SHOULDN'T be the goal. In a lot of cases. Most, I'd hazard to guess.
• contravariant 3y ago
  To me looking up old exams is normal, it's not even remotely cheating, heck it may even be expected. Saying a website that lists old exams is 'ostensibly' a study aid seems disingenuous. Poisoning said site with wrong information is just making things harder for the students which is the opposite from what a teacher is supposed to be doing. However what I don't understand is why that even mattered. Were the students just learning the questions and answers by heart to regurgitate them on the final exam? If they had any understanding at all they should have caught on, but even if they didn't they would simply demonstrate their lack of understanding, it is not dishonest. Or did they get to fill in the answers unsupervised somewhere? Because if they were left unsupervised with access the web then this is likely just the tip of the iceberg, they could more easily cheat by discussing the questions with each other. Edit: Reading more carefully it was a take-home exam apparently, which seems to have consisted of multiple-choice questions that are largely the same each year. I can vaguely see how looking up old exams would invalidate it as a test, but if your test is invalidated by normal exam preparation is it the exam's fault or the student's?
  • robochat 3y ago
    It was an online course and the exam was online too.
  • nocoiner 3y ago
    For all he knows, the students went to a site with study materials to prep for a test. His policy of disallowing students to refer to prior tests was not even explicit in the syllabus, but behind a link. If this policy were clear upfront - absolutely, reference to outside materials is inappropriate and there should be consequences. But I don’t think it’s reasonable to impose these consequences after the fact based on a reference to a reference. Based on his post, my assessment is that the prof is lazy and an asshole. Maybe there are other relevant factors that would change my analysis, but I have to think this is the version of the story that puts the prof in the most favorable possible light, so….
    • danbruc 3y ago
      For all he knows, the students went to a site with study materials to prep for a test. Generally previous exams are good for checking that you understood a topic but you can not really study a topic only from past multiple choice tests. If they had studied the topic and gained some understanding, they would have noticed that the answers are wrong. Even just looking at two different past exams would probably reveal that something is off.
• nigamanth 3y ago
  I think it's perfectly fair for the prof to catch students who are cheating this way.
  • LesZedCB 3y ago
    how would they have performed if they tried to cheat but didn't find the poisoned answers? would they have had to come up with answers on their own? suppose they cheated for 10% of the answers but had to give honest effort on the remaining 90% and just made the cut? i don't think it's very clear cut or obviously perfectly fair.
    • mu00 3y ago
      > how would they have performed if they tried to cheat but didn't find the poisoned answers? I don't think this matters. Cheating was against the rules and a cheater demonstrates a failure to adhere to a social contract and voluntarily waives their right to be assessed the same with those who did follow the rules. At least there are avenues for a cheater to have another attempt, even if they have to move to another institution.
    • jpk2f2 3y ago
      Their hypothetical score is irrelevant, as they will be receiving a zero due to cheating. In your hypothetical scenario they are still cheating, in which case their improved score would also become a zero.
      • LesZedCB 3y ago
        no, because it was undetectable they were cheating, so their grade could have been passing.
• tombert 3y ago
  Today I had to submit my final grades for my Java class, meaning I had to grade all the final exams for it last night. During the exam (which I had to administer remotely this time) I made it abundantly clear that they cannot use any kind of AI assistance for their work. No ChatGPT, no Copilot, no Bing AI, no Google Bard, and also no Googling, etc. I repeated this several times and also wrote it in bold font on the top of the test. I really didn't have any way to enforce this, but I was hoping people would be honest. I'm pretty sure that most of the students were honest on this; the answers I got generally fine, but had grammatical mistakes and were "basically correct but had light factual errors that are common with people new to programming but aren't bad enough to count as 'wrong'". One student, however, who has submitted broken sentences and broken code the entire semester, managed to suddenly have decent writing skills, decent explanations of everything, and his code was clean and concise. I'm about 95% sure he used ChatGPT to generate answers to the questions. I tried getting ChatGPT (and Bard and Bing AI) to give me a word-for-word copy of what he submitted, but I couldn't. It got somewhat close, but never an exact match. Technically, it's possible that he just studied very very hard and his code and grammar improved. It's also technically possible that he used Grammarly to make sure his writing was ok (which was technically against the rules but I wouldn't really consider cheating in a Java class), and so I just had to swallow my pride and grade the test assuming he was being honest. It's kind of upset me all day; I have worked pretty hard trying my best to be available to students if they have questions, and I worked pretty hard to try and make sure that the final exam was a reasonable level of difficulty. I think most of my students were fine, but one bad apple is enough to really ruin my day.
  • elliotto 3y ago
    Whilst it's unfortunate this kid might be cheating the system, I don't think it's worth being upset if they got through. The point of these exams is to allow students to study and learn these topics, which it sounds like they did. It sounds like while maybe you failed in gatekeeping the cheaters (an impossible post gpt task) you have succeeded in the real goal which was to help these kids learn and improve.
    • tombert 3y ago
• phkahler 3y ago
  Yes, he is unethical. He didn't just catch students cheating. He actively sabotaged the cheaters. He says he placed a (metaphorical) camera to catch the cheaters, but if he didn't pay attention to it they would have failed anyway because he planted wrong answers for them to find. Thinking about it now, he could have just graded them with the wrong answers and left it at that (a different ethical question), but it seems he was determined to "get" them, call them out, and punish. To be clear, I'm not supporting the cheaters. There are two wrongs here. "Am I the unethical one?" should instead read "am I unethical?" to avoid any discussion about which is worse. Suppose I went on the site and uploaded wrong answers, thereby clearly sabotaging cheaters. Clearly that would have negative consequences for those students and one might ask why would I do that.
  • catapart 3y ago
    Exactly. Whether he intended to or not, he - HIMSELF - put two different, equally authorially-dominant, sets of answers into the wild and expected students to pick the best one in what can only be described as an unauthorized (afaik?) social experiment. Fuck the students who thought "wait, this seems like...way wrong. I feel like he said the exact opposite in class...? But, I mean, this IS the test that I'm looking at, so I guess I'm just misremembering...", is the apparent sentiment. At least he caught the obvious cheaters, right?
    • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
      Those latter students would have been taught in high school not to trust sources without some sort of verification. Trusting that a non-verified, random upload to a cheat/study site is accurate shows lack of critical thinking skills, at best.
    • theamk 3y ago
      > equally authorially-dominant say what? One is on the official school site, in the lectures and notes from class. Second one is an anonymous upload at the weird unofficial site which does not even have university's branding. If the students can't tell those two apart, they are in deep trouble and should not be in college.
• Aunche 3y ago
  I don't think the honeypot is necessarily unethical, but giving a take-home multiple choice final exam for a philosophy course seems like several levels of bad pedagogy.
  • denton-scratch 3y ago
    Agree. I don't know what a multiple-choice philosophy exam even looks like. I did a Philosophy BA, and all the exams and assignments were essays. The non-exam assignments were all discussed in seminars.
• sevensor 3y ago
  This is unethical, but not for the reasons given. It's unethical because it favors the pre-internet status quo of cheating within one's social circle. It was well known at my university that fraternities and sororities kept libraries of old exams. A policy that catches only internet cheaters is a policy that advantages socially connected cheaters over individual cheaters.
  • kuroguro 3y ago
    Our uni's CS students kept an online catalogue of past exams/answers/cheat-sheets so it was somewhat democratic for it's time :) Tho I guess you had to know it exists to find it first.
  • denton-scratch 3y ago
    > It's unethical because it favors the pre-internet status quo Don't agree. You're saying that if I can't catch all the cheaters, then I can never call anyone out for cheating. That's a licence to cheat. Cheating is bad, for the same reason corruption is bad; once it's accepted that it's allowed, then anyone who doesn't cheat/take and give bribes, then everyone who plays by the rules is at a disadvantage. Corruption is a disease that spreads if you don't stamp it out. Also: cheating on tests is an insult to the intelligence of the examiner. The cheaters are laughing at him. If you don't call out cheaters, then the whole idea of getting a graded result becomes meaningless; you might as well simply give every student that actually paid their fees an 'A', and do without exams. BTW, I think it's irrelevant that it's an ethics exam. You don't study Ethics to become more ethical. You study it to learn about the philosophy of ethics.
• Tangurena2 3y ago
  From my experience working at a university (in the foreign language department), I found a number of students who put a large effort into "getting out of work". I was astonished at the number who put more effort into avoiding work than it would have taken to get an A. If I were in this professor's case, I'd just mark the answers wrong, and in the future upload more wrong answers. The students who use these sorts of online dumps aren't the ones who study and will beg at the end of the semester for some sort of extra-credit. If it were necessary, perhaps have a second gradebook where the number of "exactly the same wrong answer as the bait" were kept.
  • frantathefranta 3y ago
    > From my experience working at a university (in the foreign language department), I found a number of students who put a large effort into "getting out of work". I was astonished at the number who put more effort into avoiding work than it would have taken to get an A. It's funny when that happens, I used to do this in 7th or 8th grade when we were doing home exercises in touch typing. All the typing tasks were given from a textbook that was the same for everyone in the country, for a few years at least. Over 2 years of classes, I had probably spent more time scouring the internet for the solution rather than type it myself. The search was however always more entertaining than the exercise and taught me how to use the web. And I still learned how to touch type.
    • tiberious726 3y ago
      I was about the same age when I discovered my school's touch typing program saved your results as a raw text file on a shared drive---I didn't actually learn to type well until a few years later
• throwerofstone 3y ago
  While I've always had a negative outlook on the modern school system due to my own experiences, I fail to see how the answer to the title could be anything but "yes". I've seen this many times before, where a teacher seems to fail to realize that their students don't just have their own exam to prepare for; they have to prepare for many other exams at the same time, all the while struggling to balance their study time with their responsibilites at home, their social life and possibly their part-time job at the same time. So when an answer sheet is just readily available online, there aren't many students who wouldn't choose to spend a few hours memorizing the answers so they have a little more breathing room for other (possibly more difficult) exams. The statements about how this teacher apparently feels oh-so stressful about this situation that he purposefully created himself, all the while dismissing any and all critique from people because they aren't "teachers of any kind" feels very childish and leaves a very bad taste in my mouth.
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • bilvar 3y ago
    Ok, let's not inconvenience the students anymore with studying then since they're so busy. We should just award them a degree after 4 years of being in the unversity's register.
    • throwerofstone 3y ago
      My point is that expecting time-pressed students to ignore freely available answer sheets is like expecting a hungry horse to ignore a carrot dangling in front of them. There is nothing wrong with removing their ability to cheat, but purposefully uploading answer sheets and then getting angry that students made use of them isn't. In fact, it's not just wrong: it's ethically wrong.
      • mu00 3y ago
        I think the "anger" is merited since the students (1) cheated when they were clearly told not to and (2) marked answers that were "obviously wrong" which implies that not even a modicum of effort was invested in demonstrating knowledge. The "busy" argument is a poor one. We're all busy. Part of gaining an education is learning how to manage your time. As a professor myself, I know for a fact that most students manage their time poorly, yet many students will still pull the "busy" argument when it simply doesn't apply. Rather, just admit to procrastinating. Either way, the outcome is the same (poor performance). To sum up my sentiments to cheaters... "Play stupid games, win stupid prizes."
• polytely 3y ago
  Honestly, it's kinda wild to me that the final(!) is just multiple choice questions, and that it's similar enough to the one last year that you can cheat by looking at previous exams? That's just a badly designed course, feels like the students are the ones getting scammed here... I have done 2 ethics courses during my education at a Dutch 'Hogeschool' (honestly not sure how this maps to US education wikipedia says 'Vocational university'). I did a specific design ethics course and a broader ethics course as part of a philosophy minor, and in both of them you had to write papers or apply the things you learned to a case study. There were some little tests with multiple choice, but they often had additional questions where you had to explain your reasoning. Maybe there is a language difference here, but I would expect something more involved from a course given by a professor at a university, or is this a course for people who are in high school or something.
  • pixl97 3y ago
    Heh, and the professor is polluting the info space too... That is if other parties are taking this fake test out of it's multiple choice format and using the answers as data for other sources. You know, in the same ways bots steal information from recipes and mix them on pages to try to get ad hits. You start building chains of misinformation based on unethical behavior.
• rcfox 3y ago
  I'd argue that the unethical bit is knowingly publishing incorrect information, especially in an educational setting. If there's a chance that someone learned deliberately false information that they will then attempt to apply in a practical setting, then you're effectively sabotaging them. He did say that it was obviously wrong if you had been paying attention, but what if you missed a class or two?
• SilverBirch 3y ago
  > I ran a binomial analysis and found the likelihood that someone whose answers matched on 19 out of the 45 planted questions had about a 1:100 chance of doing so This is just bad math. Take a question (A), there are 5 possible answers, using his analysis the probability of a student picking the same answer as the cheating answer is 1 in 5. But let's say the question is hard, and of the 5 possible answers, 2 are highly plausible, so plausible in fact that the students always go for 1 of the 2. Now, if the cheating answer is one of the plausible answers the probability is low, but if it's one of the plausible answers, then it's high. And more specifically, if the cheat answer is correct - what's the probability the student got it right? Well what you should be doing is take the other 55 non-cheating answers, calculate the probaility of correctness and then use that as the probability. The "1/100" threshold is overwhelmingly determine by how he selected the answers on the leaked answer sheet, and you can't say it just average out with such a small sample. Modelling the whole thing as random choosing is just sloppy maths.
  • luma 3y ago
    > Most of these answers were not just wrong, but obviously wrong to anyone who had paid attention in class. Already accounted for per the article.
    • SilverBirch 3y ago
      No it's not, he says some of the answers were obviously wrong, but he did the binomial analysis on 45 questions. If you plant 45 answers in a 80 answer test and they're mostly obviously wrong then the students who cheat are going to fail either way, so it can't really be true that they were wrong. And if the answers were very obviously wrong then the probability of choosing the wrong answer for each would be much higher than assuming a 20% chance of matching the fake answer. So the whole 1in 100 is highly questionable. To put it another way, let's say he planted only wrong answers, and we have an idiot student that always gets the questions wrong. Now the probability of matching the planted answer has clearly jumped, right? On the flip side, if the planted answers are right, and in general you expect your class to pick correct answers (ie, they're going to pass) then the probability they pick the same as the cheat answer could be as high as 90%
• Silhouette 3y ago
  Add me to the list of people who see nothing wrong with this. If he didn't encourage or incentivise his students to cheat in any way (and in fact actively warned them against it) then the idea that this was some sort of entrapment is laughable. The only room for ambiguity I can see is the arbitrary 1% threshold. If there was a student just over the line then it's plausible that they were honest but unlucky here. Given the consequences of being tagged as a cheater both for this exam and beyond I would want much lower odds of a false positive and I'd certainly feel obliged to give a borderline case the benefit of the doubt. But if it was clearly understood that this kind of behaviour constituted cheating and innocence is a billion to one shot? Throw the book at them. Anything less is unfair to every student who didn't cheat.
  • coffeefirst 3y ago
    Right. He's made this harder for himself than he needs it to be. The honeypot is fine. If it were me I'd warn the class that I've seeded the internet with bullshit answer keys, and while I'll never be able to prove you used one of them, you'll probably fail if you do. And leave it at that. Instead he's guessing a threshold, and can't really be sure if someone that insists they didn't cheat is lying or not, with high stakes. It's a bad situation for all involved.
• low_tech_love 3y ago
  I work in a small university with local students that are aggressively average, if not a bit below that. Especially when it comes to writing a thesis, our expectations are extremely low, and the success rate is abysmal (something like 30% of the students in a year will actually defend their theses). If a student can reach something like, say, 10 people to do a usability test, we are extremely happy and will pass them with a smile on our faces. This year one of my students claimed to have done a user experience test with 30+ people, all of which came in person to his house during a period of 4 days. This is extremely unlikely, not to say absurdly unrealistic. If he had done it via Zoom I might maybe believe, but in person? Sorry, but no. I asked him what did his parents think of it, and magically they were both travelling that specific week. Then I asked him to scan and send me the signed consent forms for each participant; he promptly said "ok, coming!" then about 8h later I got a bunch of signed scans. Not sure what to do anymore, I guess he'll have his thesis.
  • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    > This year one of my students claimed to have done a user experience test with 30+ people, all of which came in person to his house during a period of 4 days. This is extremely unlikely, not to say absurdly unrealistic. I'm not familiar with conducting a user experience test. Why is this so unbelievable? (Also, the rest of the story is kinda hilarious; there will definitely need to be some standards and process changes in academia.)
    • q845712 3y ago
      depends on the situation but generally most people aren't that enthusiastic to be your UX guinea pigs, and it isn't that much fun to administer the same test so many times in a single day (think of how bored your optometrist sounds as they ask you which lens is better). I worked at a shop that had a target of 3-5 users for any given UX testing because usually it starts to get repetitive after that - you tend to hit the diminishing returns portion of the curve. So if you assume that the UX tests were short (20-30 minutes) you're still talking ~15 total hours spent on UX testing, or two full work days. That would be a surprising amount of time. As someone else said, it's conceivable that they ran very short studies on a large number of people in the context of having a party or a couple of small gatherings, but it does seem unlikely overall.
• johntiger1 3y ago
  Nah you're valid
• abeppu 3y ago
  Given that this was an ethics course, I think it's interesting/surprising that the professor doesn't seem to be trying to engage with what I'm guessing was the course material in this discussion. "Am I the unethical one" the right question? How about "Under which formulations of normative ethics is my behavior wrong?" 1. Is it _good_ to catch cheating? If these are students who are just checking some distributional requirement box, does it matter if they actually understood the material? Potentially there is harm (delayed graduation, literal costs, etc) from failing students (or having them be subject to some other discipline). Perhaps under a consequentialist framing, catching cheaters isn't good. But does the professor have a deontological obligation to catch cheating, and to make a good-faith effort to have fair outcomes in which students who studied and understood the material receive better grades than cheaters? 2. Is the method of catching cheaters relevant? If catching cheaters is good for consequentialist reasons, isn't any effective means of catching cheaters (which does not cause other harms) also good? Certainly the objection that the professor was dishonest by uploading the bad test sounds like it's from a deontological / rules-oriented view.
  • AstralStorm 3y ago
    1. Absolute good is problematic even for philosophers. Under consequentialist framework, catching cheaters would allow others or yourself to reeducate them, causing a lot of social repercussions, especially if the test contained safety instruction. The consequences of cheating are very complex, and ones of fostering cheating behavior even more so. 2. It is, in as much as you believe AI should provide accurate answers to others or force them to think for themselves instead. The professor is honest in deontological point of view in that they're not lying to a person, but are lying in general. Depending on deontology in question this may or may not be allowed.
  • paulsutter 3y ago
    You're making it too abstract. The professor's actions are hilarious and fair game by any measure. Bravo, well played. It's such a good idea that I'm surprised its not already commonplace. As for consequences, thats up to university policy > I am in discussion with my Chair about exactly what response is appropriate for these students, but a zero on the final is the bare minimum, and an F in the class is likely for some, if not all of those who cheated.
• lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  > I decided to ‘poison the well’ by uploading [to Quizlet] a copy of my final with wrong answers. ... My thinking was that anyone who gave a sufficient number of those same answers would be exposing themselves I kinda don't get this. Doesn't this also potentially catch students who used Quizlet to study and happened to find this teacher's "poisoned" exam? It seems like there's a pretty decent chance that at least some of the 1/3rd of the students who profess their innocence are telling the truth. Was anything done to account for that, or was it assumed that use of the site is cheating? > I’m neither a forensic mathematician, nor a cop, so this work took a lot of time that I would have preferred to have spent grading final essays. If one is willing to admit that they are not a forensic mathematician they can also be willing to admit that they made a mistake with their forensic mathematics. This person seems to have over-assumed a lack of mistakes in their understanding considering the certainty with which they choose to end these academic careers. Edit: > As far as Quizlet goes, all I did was go to the website that is designed to facilitate cheating and set up a kind of camera to see who visited it. (emphasis mine) So they just assume that a person using the website is cheating. One might actually make flash cards based on previous exam questions/answers using said information to be certain that their flash cards are accurate. What if that person was thinking to themselves, "This doesn't sound right, but if that's what's on the test..."?
  • iinnPP 3y ago
    The answers were purposely wrong though and supposedly obviously so. Something I have seen in every multiple choice test I have ever taken. I don't think it's possible anyone legitimately studied using easily determined false information. If they did, failing the course seems appropriate anyway.
    • lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
      They're on a website which is telling them that they're getting real exam questions and answers. It's reasonable to expect the questions and answers are not false and make, e.g., flash cards from them. I'm not so sure I'd agree that failing the course is really appropriate. These people are paying to learn and the teacher provided wrong answers to students who may have legitimately been looking to study. Of course, 2/3 of the students admit it, so it's moot in those cases; at least some of those who claim innocence may have a reasonable claim.
• codetrotter 3y ago
  He did the right thing.
• throwawayffffas 3y ago
  On the case presented I have to say, the professor is being unethical. Looking up questions and answers to previous exams is practically studying. The point is to know the subject matter not to read it through a specific source or in a specific format. He should stop being lazy and vary the questions every year. If after a few years there is a body of previous exams covering the entire subject matter, then great the students "cheating" will be studying the entire course in Q/A format.
  • aidenn0 3y ago
    I (perhaps incorrectly) inferred that they copied from the site during the take-home exam, which is clearly cheating.
    • throwawayffffas 3y ago
      Ah, I missed the take home aspect. Then yes that would be clearly cheating.
  • anonymouskimmer 3y ago
    It's not evident to me that knowing particular questions and answers in a multiple choice test is equivalent to knowing the subject matter. If these were essay or short-answer exams I might feel differently (though being able to copy-and-paste would make actually reading the correct answers, much less understanding them, optional).
  • jpk2f2 3y ago
    At the universities I'm familiar with, looking up and using previous exams (not provided by the teacher) is explicitly considered cheating.
• taylorius 3y ago
  I was interviewing a candidate a couple of months ago, and as part of the assessment they were required to write a bat and ball game in Javascript, in advance of the interview.We would go through the code during the interview and I would ask them how it might be modified / extended in various ways. This candidate produced a reasonable, functional bat and ball game in a couple of pages of Javascript code, and I had high hopes for the interview. But as soon as I tried to delve into the code with the candidate, it became clear they had no idea what half of it was doing. I suppose they got chatGPT to write it for them, or something. Was disappointed and vaguely annoyed to have wasted my time.
• colinsane 3y ago
  back in my day — which really wasn’t very long ago — profs used to google their exams before administering them. if they found results (like this), they would simply administer a different (new) exam. it’s work: it might mean maintaining a pool of questions double the size of your exams ready to go at any moment, but it’s a decent way to just not have to worry about this. the response, hopefully unsurprisingly, is that past students would circulate their exams under the table. every big frat maintained a dropbox (or megaupload, at the time) of scanned exams, with links shared only to the frat members. i actually did study for exams. i wasn’t in a frat but one day a friend from a frat showed up to our study session with some “practice exams” for us. i learned about these scans and worked some grease to get access to these files for a good 4-5 different frats. if doing homework is prep for the exam, then working through past exams is even better prep for the exam. having access to realistic exams was a huge leg up for me, even when the questions didn’t overlap. the best profs were aware of this and just published their previous exams on their course webpage to level the field. yeah, it’s extra work to write a new exam every year but that’s just what you do: especially if doing so encourages your students to study!
• chungy 3y ago
  Nope, not unethical.
• scythe 3y ago
  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36087175 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36087175 'nocoiner mentioned in a sublevel comment that the syllabus was not very clear about not referencing old course materials: >His policy of disallowing students to refer to prior tests was not even explicit in the syllabus, but behind a link. If this policy were clear upfront - absolutely, reference to outside materials is inappropriate and there should be consequences. If you want to catch students cheating, you should be clear with them beforehand what constitutes cheating.
• aidenn0 3y ago
  It's been two decades since I took an ethics class, but here's my stab: Kant would call this unethical because he argued against any philanthropic impetus towards lying. Of course he would also call the misrepresentation by the students to be unethical. Utilitarianism has trouble dealing with cheating because any single act of cheating seems to cause benefits for the cheater greater than the damage a single cheater does. Rule-based utilitarianism attempts to resolve this by considering that if too many people cheat, the negative outcomes to the school then outweigh the sum of the individual advantages of those cheating (particularly since any performative aspects of getting a high grade go away when it becomes well known that many people cheated to get those grades). Many people argue that rule-based utilitarianism just devolves to utilitarianism since no two situations are ever identical. I never really quite grokked virtue ethics, but it seems to me that if the professor is upright and is acting with the intent of helping the students who didn't cheat (by raising their grade relative to cheaters) then this would probably get a stamp of approval. Moral relativism would acknowledge that his actions will be deemed immoral by his students (who just want to pass the class, and feel attacked and deceived by this), but moral from the point of view of a teacher who is required by their position to come up with some form of practical assessment for a class of nearly 100 students.
  • mquander 3y ago
    > Utilitarianism has trouble dealing with cheating because any single act of cheating seems to cause benefits for the cheater greater than the damage a single cheater does. It clearly doesn't? There's no sensible mechanism by which someone cheating to get a higher grade will help them, except by hurting someone else. The main dream of the cheater is to get some kind of rewarding job later based on the strength of their transcript, instead of some other guy who would otherwise have been doing that job, and who (if you think the grades prior to cheating had any usefulness at all) would most likely have been better at the job. It's hard to be able to predict in advance exactly who will be harmed by any given act of cheating, but that isn't a problem for utilitarianism.
    • aidenn0 3y ago
      Unless the outcomes to all students involved are zero-sum, it's not hard to have a model in which a single student getting an artificially higher grade through some unfair mechanism is a net utility gain. It was one of the arguments specifically presented in my intro-to-ethics class (though it was not cheating, it was a student asking their professor (who was a utilitarian) to give them a slightly higher grade; for pure utilitarianism the mechanism that results in inflating the grade is irrelevant).
• tptacek 3y ago
  One thing I want to say here is that "entrapment" isn't a moral principle; it's a legal one, and it isn't universal. We don't get it from English Common Law, where it wasn't widely known before the founding of the US, and was rejected when it did come up. Entrapment is a checks-and-balances balance of power mechanism, not a general rule of conduct. Furthermore, while we don't reach the question of whether this dummy test constituted entrapment (because it doesn't matter), it's also simply not entrapment under the US legal definition (arguably the most important such definition). In the US, an entrapment defense requires you to (1) admit that you did the bad thing, (2) prove that you were somehow coerced (at least psychologically) into doing that bad thing, and (3) prove that you had no predisposition to doing the bad thing. You're searching for exam questions and memorizing a bogus final exam. You know you're cheating, you know it's wrong, and you do it anyways. You're culpable.
  • CPLX 3y ago
    Indeed. Entrapment is such a narrow case and is designed to stop the government from taking advantage of vulnerable people. If you call someone who has just lost their job and is not able to feed their baby and say if you do this drug deal I’ll get you enough to buy baby food that’s entrapment, assuming they weren’t already involved in the drugs trade and this “crime” would never have happened without the government willing it into existence.
    • GauntletWizard 3y ago
      And to be clear on the other end (with requisite IANAL) - If the undercover officer says "You holding? I got cash", it is not entrapment. Simply making a request for a transaction isn't entrapment, even if you're being circumspect. Even if you're aggressive about it - "I know you're holding, give me the drugs, man" - That's not entrapment, especially if they are actually "holding". Entrapment is a narrow defense - The Government forced me to do something I would not otherwise have done. If someone other than the government (and it's agents) coerces you, that's not entrapment (but may be a defense).
  • RcouF1uZ4gsC 3y ago
    This cartoon is a great overview of the legal aspects of entrapment. https://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-was-entrapped https://thecriminallawyer.tumblr.com/post/19810672629/12-i-w...
• karaterobot 3y ago
  Why even go through the process of accusing them of cheating? If the fake answers were all wrong, just grade the test honestly and the cheaters will get what's coming to them without any ambiguity or additional overhead on his part. I would just ignore any problematizers who question the ethics of testing students' honesty. I think those people are silly and should rightly be ignored, except to mock them. But that's probably why I'm not a philosopher.
  • mannykannot 3y ago
    I would be tempted to do the same, and not say anything about it. It would be interesting and informative to see how the cheaters responded. It is not something one could do every time, however, as it will become known that the actual questions (though with incorrect answers) could be found on the web.
  • phs 3y ago
    As an extension, after the exam publicly declare the poison-pill answers to deter the next semester's batch. Would that start an arms race causing the students to work harder to find the right answers? Mission accomplished.
  • balderdash 3y ago
    Because the punishment for cheating is not a poor grade but severe discipline (typically suspension or expulsion), the bad grade was for not learning the material in class.
  • jeroenhd 3y ago
    At my previous university, this would constitute as blatant plagiarism. Plagiarism was punished by a "three strikes and you're out" principle. If you got caught more than twice over the three years bachelor course, you got kicked out and couldn't start the same program for a few years. You also had to explain (or defend, but rarely anyone ever got accused on false grounds) your transgression to the graduation board, with the possibility of worse punishment if you were particularly blatant about the whole thing. Obviously, you immediately failed the course you were caught on as well. This system worked well. Cheating was rare and students appropriately shot down team members that would suggest any type of plagiarism. So, why go through the process of accusing them? Because cheating deserves worse than just a bad grade, in my opinion.
• skizm 3y ago
  If things today are similar to they were ~10-15 years ago when I was in college, deciding not to cheat was actually pretty tough. So many people were cheating in every class I was in I felt like I was handicapping myself by not also doing it. I had to actively ignore obvious cheaters in a lot of situations since our honor code indicated that if you saw it, and did not report it, you could be in similar trouble, so I had to give myself plausible deniability. Very stressful. I guess I could have tried just burning it all down and reporting every instance I saw, but that felt like inviting trouble and way more hassle than it was worth to just keep my head down.
• wilg 3y ago
  In my opinion, teaching should not involve taking tests at all. Students should be offered optional tests for self-assessment and for professional certification. Otherwise, focus on teaching. I see no real educational merit to it, and a lot of heartache for teachers and students.
• derfnugget 3y ago
  Where's your head aaaaat. Where's your head at? You are unethical because at some point you decided it's not about teaching them, it's about catching them. I think you should take a minute to think about what your role actually is. Time is limited. Spend it on what matters.
• andrewljohnson 3y ago
  He's not unethical, just lazy. He should make better tests, and update them every term. He doesn't need to frame the questions the same way each year.
• WalterBright 3y ago
  I love the irony that the students were cheating in an Ethics class. As for entrapment, it's no different from leaving your front door unlocked being entrapment for thieves (it isn't). The cheaters are adults, know what cheating is, know they cheated, and know what the consequences are. No sympathy. Give them all an F for the course.
  • AlbertCory 3y ago
    Reminds me of the (very) old Woody Allen joke: "I cheated on the Philosophy exam: I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me."
• reformedposter 3y ago
  The argument for these ethics classes being mandatory in the CS curriculum is that they will prevent unethical behavior in industry. The article demonstrates the classes aren't even effective at preventing unethical behavior in the same classroom they're taught in. Waste of time.
• overgard 3y ago
  To a certain extent, I wonder if the real problem is the focus on tests and memorization. In the real world, "knowing" something means you can apply it to a project. I "know" guitar if I can play multiple songs well, not if I can easily tell you how to form the first inversion of c major 7 in a specific tuning or something. I could be a savant on tests and not be able to play Wonderwall. I know programming if I can write good working code, not if I can answer trivia about C++ virtual tables. My point being in the real world people look things up all the time, IE, cheat. Ability to memorize for an arbitrary test is a bad measure of the ability to apply learning. Also admittedly its been a while since i've been in school, but in my day (like 10 years ago), a take home final was not considered a serious thing. I think that happened maybe once or twice and it was because the final barely mattered.
• tpoacher 3y ago
  Am I the only one here who thinks the prof's statistical reasoning, which is being waved at as proof, is really, really bad? And I mean, aside from the whole typical fallacy of treating a p-value as a statement on posterior probability.
• robochat 3y ago
  Can anyone explain the maths that he did because my calculation give different results. Isn't there only a 1 in 2588 chance of a student 'guessing' 19 'answers' out of 45 where there are 5 options for each answer? Whereas the article states that it is 1 in 100 ? (actually he writes 1:100 which is odds, so it is 1 in 101?) Don't we just use the Binomial distribution, so: Prob = 45!/(19!26!) * (1/5)*19 * (1 - 1/5)*26 It's really bugging me that I can't get the maths to work.
• cafard 3y ago
  I took a number of philosophy courses in college, and do not remember ever seeing one with multiple-choice questions on an exam. Although I deeply sympathize with those who do not wish to read undergraduates' prose, still I think that this comes with the instructor's job. I think the instructor was wrong, as a matter of manners at least, perhaps as a matter of responsibility. Suppose one of his students suspected someone employed by a cleaning service, on no particularly good grounds. What would he think of that student leaving a $20 on a table under some papers, in the expectation that it might be stolen?
• bawolff 3y ago
  So if they accessed the quizlet during the test it certainly seems like cheating. However if students were studying by rote memorization of basically any resource they can get their hands on, then i could see this happening without the students realizing that the website had answers from the test (yes rote memorization is a bad way to learn, but that never stopped undergrads). Like to what level is a student expected to investigate the source of study material?
• kaoD 3y ago
  If your exam can be cheated on, you're doing exams wrong.
• sebzim4500 3y ago
  Obviously yes. Ignore the question of whether this is entrapment (legally of course it isn't, morally idk). He's intentionally spreading misinformation online to save himself time writing a new exam. How could this possibly be ethical?
• grogers 3y ago
  It strikes me as odd that the prof picked 1/100 as the threshold for accusing students of cheating. That seems far too low for a class of 96 students. It's very possible that one or more students were falsely accused. I get that they tried to pick the "worst" answer as the cheated one, but still.
• williamkuszmaul 3y ago
  1/100 is too large of a cutoff imo. If you have a class of 96 students, there's a decent chance that an innocent student gets flagged for no reason. I hope he lets the student on the bubble off the hook.
• wly_cdgr 3y ago
  Expel every single one of those students.
• rifty 3y ago
  The professors action in isolation was unethical by virtue of purposefully misinforming a public resource. But the primary fault for outcome lies with the students. But the pedagogy could be improved if trying to reduce instances of cheating. The trap wasn't just the professors intentful actions; doing a take home final was also cheaters bait. Perhaps even how the quizes, class, and assignments were ran were also cheaters bait and creating cheating habits. If the idea is to teach people to be ethical in practice through discipline and not just simply about ethics, it really shouldn't be a lesson only experienced at the point when repercussions for failing are extreme and extend beyond the effected situation. Though I'm not sure fixating heavily on cheating marks is the right way to frame the problem of trying to improve performance, understanding, and confidence in a subject... It feels like some portion of the cheating of the institution, is self inflected due to the orthodoxy of the institution itself.
• crazygringo 3y ago
  Here's my problem with what the professor did, and my problem whenever a professor tries to get "clever" to catch a whole class cheating -- it's selective enforcement. My problem is that the incentives at school mostly encourage students to cheat. They have learned, class after class, semester after semester, that cheating is widespread and that therefore the only way to get a fair reward-to-effort ratio is to cheat. Then, they happen to get unlucky by taking a particular class a particular semester, they get caught, and get punished. Yet 99% of the other students at the institution never get caught. That's not fair. That's not just. What isn't right here is for a professor to go on a private crusade that isn't aligned with the university's enforcement policies generally. I'm all for it if the university wants to stamp out cheating completely, so anti-cheating measures are utilized in every class, so 85% of cheaters ultimately get caught, and students overwhelmingly stop cheating. Then it's a level playing field again. But a situation where the university's official policies are against cheating yet their minimal and lax actions allow it to flourish, and then one professor decides to punish just a tiny number who get bad luck... there's nothing fair, just, or ethical about that. EDIT: there seems to be some deep misinterpretation of what I said in some replies. Perhaps this analogy will help: there's a 55 mph speed limit in a state, but everybody knows that everywhere in the state cops don't stop you unless you're going over 65. Except for one village where the cops ticket everyone going just 56, and because locals know but nobody else does, all town revenue comes from speeding fines and the locals pay zero local taxes. Does anybody here this that is fair? Think that is just? The principle here is that it's unethical to enforce policy/laws to such a small extent that they fail to deter behavior in general, but still punish a small group of people who are simply unlucky. Either strengthen enforcement so it deters, or don't enforce it at all. Because sporadic enforcement that fails to deter is the worst of all possible outcomes. There's nothing just about it whatsoever.
  • AlbertCory 3y ago
    Nonsense. "Everyone does it" is a lousy defense, and all laws are selectively enforced. They cheated. Period.
    • crazygringo 3y ago
• tempfortwitt90 3y ago
  I was once 'caught' providing alcohol to a minor at a sting event at a 7-11. The 16-18 year old came up to me, with his 16-18 year old gf, while I was browsing a Redbox kiosk and asked me very politely to buy him alcohol. I said "no way, sorry". A minute later he asked a guy behind me waiting, also politely and was told no. I left. Drove 3-4 minutes away. I felt bad. I stopped at a store, got him a 6 pack, and drove back and gave it to him. The sting operation was not ready for this scenario. I drove away. 2 minutes later 3 cop cars surrounded me and ordered me out of my car. Long story short, I talked to a lawyer about potentially trying to get off on an entrapment defense. He said I MIGHT have a chance because I said no at first and left. And that something about the scenario made me come back even though my impulse was to say no. He even reached out to someone (DA?) regarding the case. When I went for the initial hearing where I planned to reschedule for a hearing with a lawyer, all charges were dropped. Is this because they realized it almost was entrapment in a way? I'll never know.
• NoZebra120vClip 3y ago
  Have you ever taken a certification exam, such as one from CompTIA? They're traditionally held at testing centers, though there is an online option today. The testing center is a high-security proctored environment. I come to the counter, I present ID to be verified. They have convenience lockers; I empty my pockets and put my keys, wallet, phone, watch, everything goes into the locker. Then they verify that and I sign in, acknowledging that I must bring nothing into the testing lab. My photograph is taken, and I may be issued a writing-tablet and stylus for taking notes during the test. I enter the testing lab, and typically there were only a handful of people in a room with two dozen stations. There are cameras on the walls and probably microphones too. There was not typically a proctor in the room, but they could enter at any time. If I had trouble with technical issues, or I finished the test, I would raise my hand or stand up, but I had to stay put, and I couldn't lean over to anyone else and whisper or have a conversation. This was commonly the same method to proctor students taking standardized entrance exams or finals. I took a final exam in a disability office that was slightly less formal, but with the same requirements of bringing nothing in, and being monitored by camera. There is a good deal of controversy, now that students test from home, whether students should be monitored by spyware that "proctors" their exams and uses AI to flag possible cheating. But that's just part of the landscape, isn't it?
• fwlr 3y ago
  “40 of the 96 students” caught cheating. No comment on the rest of the article but damn, that is an unbelievable number. If that is a representative amount of cheating for college, then it’s completely unrecognizable academic landscape from when I experienced it.
• chrismcb 3y ago
  Despite the rules of the university I wouldn't think looking up past tests is wrong or cheating. But I don't see anything wrong with what the teacher did. And personally I think he should just let the results stand. It sounds like the students missed up to half the questions (or more)