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> 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 o

> 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.
  - r3trohack3r 3y ago
    Making flash cards from the exam's answer sheet is somewhat hard to defend on it's own. But when you're getting tested for your knowledge of a subject, and you make flash cards from an exam's answer sheet with blatantly incorrect answers that demonstrates a lack of knowledge, I have a hard time feeling sympathy. To oversimplify, it's hard to defend a CS exam where a student selects (D) here and their excuse was that a flash card told them to do it: How would you import a module in javascript? A) import * from 'foo' B) from 'foo' import * C) import { * } from 'foo' D) for i in `seq 1 10`; do echo "$i"; done Note, there are a tonne of questions upstream from this like the validity of requiring these students to be taking this class, and requiring them to take this exam, and this format of testing students, etc. But keeping the question of whether the student's outcome was reasonably impacted by the decision to replace the answer sheet with a fake answer sheet on Quizlet, I have a hard time believing it did.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
      I don't specifically disagree that the student should have failed the course when they clearly do not understand the material. I know that's contradictory to what I said above; from one perspective (the university's; rule-based) they should fail and from another (the one for which I am arguing) they should not. > whether the student's outcome was reasonably impacted Here's where I have a hard time. It's very easy for the outcome to change from a failed test to a failed academic career. The method by which the professor determined who was cheating is dubious enough that it may have caught non-cheaters (from an ethical perspective; assume that the person who found the test on the website is genuinely intending to study the material which they believe is correct). I guess it's moot from the university's perspective if it's against their cheating policy. But on this ethics topic, I'd have to argue for the professor to have more doubts about their decision.
      - rprospero 3y ago
        I see your point about a student attempting to pass the exam, studying the incorrect material, and failing the course. However, I see that situation as morally equivalent to the following scenario: Sam has been having trouble understanding their evolutionary biology coursework all semester. It's coming close to the final and they are frantic to find any help they can get. Finally, they encounter the Answers in Genesis website and use it to make a set of flash cards. They drill those flash cards relentlessly in their best effor to learn the material. Come the final, Sam answers every question with "God did it and evolution is a lie". I will agree with you that Sam has not behaved unethically and has not cheated on the exam, just as you believe that some students did not cheat on the ethics exam. That said, I do not believe that Sam should pass the final, as they have no understanding of the material. Even though Sam has put hard effort into studying, they have studied the wrong material and put zero effort into vetting their sources, so they deserve to fail the course. Do you believe that Sam deserves to pass the course or am I missing an important difference between my hypothetical and the actual events?
MengerSponge 3y ago
The academic integrity policy can forbid access or use of test solutions. A student who studied from that resource isn't innocent. You want to tune your policies so that students will bring that extra test that was lost in the printer tray back to you.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  > A student who studied from that resource isn't innocent. I guess it's more understandable if that's the position being taken. However, that makes me want to ask a different question: why is that bad? A student who uses said resource to study for the test during usual study hours but walks into the test without any extra material is taking the test on their own merit.
  - LodeOfCode 3y ago
    Because the test can't reasonably cover all of the course material in depth. The idea is that the test takes a representative sample of the course material, so your understanding of the material on the test is indicative of your understanding of the course material overall. Specifically studying the material you know is on the test invalidates this premise, and by extension the results of the test
  - MengerSponge 3y ago
    I'm going to assume you're giving this hypothetical student the benefit of the doubt, so we can discard the "ACCACA DABACCA" version of test prep (Which is what the professor in the linked article is alleging) https://youtu.be/0cyS4HZ_Dxc?t=56 https://youtu.be/0cyS4HZ_Dxc?t=56 With that out of the way: Why is it bad for a student to study for a test from an unofficial test bank? It's really stinking hard to write a good test question. It needs to be possible, clear, and not exactly* like problems you've done in class and homework. There are a few exceptions to this for "canonical" problems/derivations. Capacitance of parallel plates, for example. It's very different if a student chooses a problem to study, and that problem is on the test, versus a student who is given a problem to study that is from the test. For example, if I give a "derivation of cylindrical capacitor" in my test prep packet, and a student looks at that and also studies the spherical and parallel plate geometries, that's great for them! They thought deeper about what was going to be on the test, and directed their attention accordingly.
LanceH 3y ago
Everything you say might be true. But it seems that the only "studying" that really stuck was when they went to quizlet. Read the rest of it where most of them admitted to cheating -- which probably means pulling it up and copying the answer. Cheating is rampant in general and a lot of people bend over backwards to rationalize it. In short, they were given numerous valid resources and chose chose not to use them. Then they went completely outside the class and used unverified information in place of learning the material. Assuming it wasn't an "open internet" test, then there is nothing wrong with this. Out of all those people studying all those wrong answers author doesn't mention a single one of them bringing it up during office hours. I'm assuming they didn't. They all thought they were getting away with something and had an edge over actually studying. They were wrong.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  > They all thought they were getting away with something and had an edge over actually studying. My point is that these people didn't (necessarily) do something wrong. The only reason they had to think they were doing something wrong is that the rules say they're doing something wrong. If a professor provided the questions and answers for flash cards to be made, is that functionally different from the students getting such information from a third-party? It's "cheating" from a rules-based definition but I don't see how a person is necessarily not learning from that.
  - TremendousJudge 3y ago
    >It's "cheating" from a rules-based definition Is there any other kind of cheating?
    - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
      Assuming there's a reason for a rule, an action might not go against that reason even if it goes against a literal interpretation of the rule. In such a case, it should be determined that there's no reason to be against the action. The ostensible reason to be against cheating is that it devalues the degrees the university gives out if it can't be trusted that a person earned said degree through merit. I'm saying that a person who found the exam and learned from that material isn't going against this reason to be against cheating; they did, in fact, pass the exam on their own merit. At least, I don't see why I should consider it differently.
1000100_1000101 3y ago
Yeah, it entirely depends on the timeline of the poisoning. If the bad results were uploaded just prior to the exam, and the results were cloned, people likely cheated. I think this trap is fine. Hopefully he had his bad results pulled afterwards too, so the site only contained flawed data during the exam period. If the bad results were uploaded several days prior to the exam we run the risk of people studied, and couldn't fathom why their answers didn't match the "official results", but learned the wrong result was the correct answer. It may have stuck in their heads simply because it was an unexpected answer. Perhaps these people didn't even go back to the site during the exam at all, but the weird results from the studying phase were what they could recall. In this second case, the trap isn't good at all. It may have caused people to recall the incorrect answers learned from study, not from cheating during the exam. This is a horrible thing to do to your students. It may have caused some people to doubt themselves during study, and pushed them to cheat during the exam because they clearly didn't understand something. This is unfortunate. Prof and student share some blame here. How to classify this case is difficult. Without the poisoned study material, these students may have actually known the material, felt confident, and aced the exam. We'll never know.
- lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
  Thank you, this is what I was trying to describe. I don't intend to argue this necessarily happened (I'd expect it probably did not), just point out the possibility. It doesn't seem to me the professor really did enough to determine the actions of these students and there is potentially good reason for them to believe the 13 or so students who claim to have not cheated. Certainly the "one student who is right ‘on the bubble’" could be given more benefit of the doubt. I guess it's moot given the actual policy against looking up tests without the professor's permission. I can see how it's a shortcut to find the correct answers without necessarily understanding the material. But I still see a reasonable perspective that the professor's decision potentially caught people who were genuinely intending to learn.
- pixl97 3y ago
  >Hopefully he had his bad results pulled afterwards too, Also remember anything you put on the internet is forever... Pretty much this guy may be doing the 'bullshit generation problem' we are starting to accuse AI of doing.
DanHulton 3y ago
From TFA: > My University has an academic honesty policy that explicitly says that looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating (Although had I know it would be this much of an issue I would have been explicit about that in my syllabus as well, rather than just linking to the policy, an oversight I plan to correct going forward.) If they went to Quizlet and viewed previous tests, yes, they were cheating by definition. No assumption necessary.
balderdash 3y ago
The article explicitly states that the school policy disallows the use of previous tests without the professor’s approval. So any use of the test as a study aid is cheating.

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.
- r3trohack3r 3y ago
  Making flash cards from the exam's answer sheet is somewhat hard to defend on it's own. But when you're getting tested for your knowledge of a subject, and you make flash cards from an exam's answer sheet with blatantly incorrect answers that demonstrates a lack of knowledge, I have a hard time feeling sympathy. To oversimplify, it's hard to defend a CS exam where a student selects (D) here and their excuse was that a flash card told them to do it: How would you import a module in javascript? A) import * from 'foo' B) from 'foo' import * C) import { * } from 'foo' D) for i in `seq 1 10`; do echo "$i"; done Note, there are a tonne of questions upstream from this like the validity of requiring these students to be taking this class, and requiring them to take this exam, and this format of testing students, etc. But keeping the question of whether the student's outcome was reasonably impacted by the decision to replace the answer sheet with a fake answer sheet on Quizlet, I have a hard time believing it did.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    I don't specifically disagree that the student should have failed the course when they clearly do not understand the material. I know that's contradictory to what I said above; from one perspective (the university's; rule-based) they should fail and from another (the one for which I am arguing) they should not. > whether the student's outcome was reasonably impacted Here's where I have a hard time. It's very easy for the outcome to change from a failed test to a failed academic career. The method by which the professor determined who was cheating is dubious enough that it may have caught non-cheaters (from an ethical perspective; assume that the person who found the test on the website is genuinely intending to study the material which they believe is correct). I guess it's moot from the university's perspective if it's against their cheating policy. But on this ethics topic, I'd have to argue for the professor to have more doubts about their decision.
    - rprospero 3y ago
      I see your point about a student attempting to pass the exam, studying the incorrect material, and failing the course. However, I see that situation as morally equivalent to the following scenario: Sam has been having trouble understanding their evolutionary biology coursework all semester. It's coming close to the final and they are frantic to find any help they can get. Finally, they encounter the Answers in Genesis website and use it to make a set of flash cards. They drill those flash cards relentlessly in their best effor to learn the material. Come the final, Sam answers every question with "God did it and evolution is a lie". I will agree with you that Sam has not behaved unethically and has not cheated on the exam, just as you believe that some students did not cheat on the ethics exam. That said, I do not believe that Sam should pass the final, as they have no understanding of the material. Even though Sam has put hard effort into studying, they have studied the wrong material and put zero effort into vetting their sources, so they deserve to fail the course. Do you believe that Sam deserves to pass the course or am I missing an important difference between my hypothetical and the actual events?

MengerSponge 3y ago

The academic integrity policy can forbid access or use of test solutions. A student who studied from that resource isn't innocent. You want to tune your policies so that students will bring that extra test that was lost in the printer tray back to you.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
> A student who studied from that resource isn't innocent. I guess it's more understandable if that's the position being taken. However, that makes me want to ask a different question: why is that bad? A student who uses said resource to study for the test during usual study hours but walks into the test without any extra material is taking the test on their own merit.
- LodeOfCode 3y ago
  Because the test can't reasonably cover all of the course material in depth. The idea is that the test takes a representative sample of the course material, so your understanding of the material on the test is indicative of your understanding of the course material overall. Specifically studying the material you know is on the test invalidates this premise, and by extension the results of the test
- MengerSponge 3y ago
  I'm going to assume you're giving this hypothetical student the benefit of the doubt, so we can discard the "ACCACA DABACCA" version of test prep (Which is what the professor in the linked article is alleging) https://youtu.be/0cyS4HZ_Dxc?t=56 https://youtu.be/0cyS4HZ_Dxc?t=56 With that out of the way: Why is it bad for a student to study for a test from an unofficial test bank? It's really stinking hard to write a good test question. It needs to be possible, clear, and not exactly* like problems you've done in class and homework. There are a few exceptions to this for "canonical" problems/derivations. Capacitance of parallel plates, for example. It's very different if a student chooses a problem to study, and that problem is on the test, versus a student who is given a problem to study that is from the test. For example, if I give a "derivation of cylindrical capacitor" in my test prep packet, and a student looks at that and also studies the spherical and parallel plate geometries, that's great for them! They thought deeper about what was going to be on the test, and directed their attention accordingly.

LanceH 3y ago

Everything you say might be true. But it seems that the only "studying" that really stuck was when they went to quizlet. Read the rest of it where most of them admitted to cheating -- which probably means pulling it up and copying the answer. Cheating is rampant in general and a lot of people bend over backwards to rationalize it. In short, they were given numerous valid resources and chose chose not to use them. Then they went completely outside the class and used unverified information in place of learning the material. Assuming it wasn't an "open internet" test, then there is nothing wrong with this. Out of all those people studying all those wrong answers author doesn't mention a single one of them bringing it up during office hours. I'm assuming they didn't. They all thought they were getting away with something and had an edge over actually studying. They were wrong.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
> They all thought they were getting away with something and had an edge over actually studying. My point is that these people didn't (necessarily) do something wrong. The only reason they had to think they were doing something wrong is that the rules say they're doing something wrong. If a professor provided the questions and answers for flash cards to be made, is that functionally different from the students getting such information from a third-party? It's "cheating" from a rules-based definition but I don't see how a person is necessarily not learning from that.
- TremendousJudge 3y ago
  >It's "cheating" from a rules-based definition Is there any other kind of cheating?
  - lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
    Assuming there's a reason for a rule, an action might not go against that reason even if it goes against a literal interpretation of the rule. In such a case, it should be determined that there's no reason to be against the action. The ostensible reason to be against cheating is that it devalues the degrees the university gives out if it can't be trusted that a person earned said degree through merit. I'm saying that a person who found the exam and learned from that material isn't going against this reason to be against cheating; they did, in fact, pass the exam on their own merit. At least, I don't see why I should consider it differently.

1000100_1000101 3y ago

Yeah, it entirely depends on the timeline of the poisoning. If the bad results were uploaded just prior to the exam, and the results were cloned, people likely cheated. I think this trap is fine. Hopefully he had his bad results pulled afterwards too, so the site only contained flawed data during the exam period. If the bad results were uploaded several days prior to the exam we run the risk of people studied, and couldn't fathom why their answers didn't match the "official results", but learned the wrong result was the correct answer. It may have stuck in their heads simply because it was an unexpected answer. Perhaps these people didn't even go back to the site during the exam at all, but the weird results from the studying phase were what they could recall. In this second case, the trap isn't good at all. It may have caused people to recall the incorrect answers learned from study, not from cheating during the exam. This is a horrible thing to do to your students. It may have caused some people to doubt themselves during study, and pushed them to cheat during the exam because they clearly didn't understand something. This is unfortunate. Prof and student share some blame here. How to classify this case is difficult. Without the poisoned study material, these students may have actually known the material, felt confident, and aced the exam. We'll never know.

lcnPylGDnU4H9OF 3y ago
Thank you, this is what I was trying to describe. I don't intend to argue this necessarily happened (I'd expect it probably did not), just point out the possibility. It doesn't seem to me the professor really did enough to determine the actions of these students and there is potentially good reason for them to believe the 13 or so students who claim to have not cheated. Certainly the "one student who is right ‘on the bubble’" could be given more benefit of the doubt. I guess it's moot given the actual policy against looking up tests without the professor's permission. I can see how it's a shortcut to find the correct answers without necessarily understanding the material. But I still see a reasonable perspective that the professor's decision potentially caught people who were genuinely intending to learn.
pixl97 3y ago
>Hopefully he had his bad results pulled afterwards too, Also remember anything you put on the internet is forever... Pretty much this guy may be doing the 'bullshit generation problem' we are starting to accuse AI of doing.

DanHulton 3y ago

From TFA: > My University has an academic honesty policy that explicitly says that looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating (Although had I know it would be this much of an issue I would have been explicit about that in my syllabus as well, rather than just linking to the policy, an oversight I plan to correct going forward.) If they went to Quizlet and viewed previous tests, yes, they were cheating by definition. No assumption necessary.

balderdash 3y ago

The article explicitly states that the school policy disallows the use of previous tests without the professor’s approval. So any use of the test as a study aid is cheating.