Interesting debate offered: Did these students cheat?

The school can't prove that the original aqcuirer of the test bank did so illegally, so the idea that this is somehow unethical is ridiculous. The students did nothing wrong, the professor was lazy. He said they rewrote the test in 96 hours and the new version contains no questions from any publishers test bank, even from those that did not provide textbooks used in the class. Why didn't the prof and his staff do that in the first place? There is no way that this will stand up in court when one of the accused students decides to sue over it - and one of them will.

 

The only cheater here is the prof who was too lazy to come up with a real exam. Sure questions are going to be reused, but to then turn it around and say the students cheated? Ridiculous. Hopefully the students are vindicated.

 

Just want to point out that there is a difference between illegal and unethical. I do not believe what these students did was either, but just because something is unethical does not make it illegal.

 

The question then is whether or not they studied the book only to get test answers or just to prepare for the test.

 

How many people here have, in the interest of saving time and/or reading went straight to the review questions at the end of the chapter while studying?

The only way they would have known what the test questions would be was if the Prof had a long history of not changing the questions.

 

No, but something illegal is unethical by definition, and the prof mentioned that there was a legal investigation about to begin.

I really don't see the issue other than a lazy prof. As an employer I WANT employees that are willing to go the extra mile to gain an advantage, that show initiative and street smarts. Do you think Microsoft isn't reverse engineering the iPhone? That isn't cheating, and it isn't unethical.

 

So let me get this straight. The professor accused the students of doing something wrong when they didn't, and wanted to punish them? Did he used to teach at Duke? [/crossthread]

 

I have looked at garage sales for teacher's copies. It was a way to try to teach my daughter math.

The professor could have asked a couple of essay or fill-in-the-blank questions to serve as a control.

I had a good accounting teacher who would ask about current events in business because he wanted us to pay attention to business news. If you followed the news even by checking business headlines, the questions were easy.

 

At my university, a lot of professors actually had copies of old tests on reserve at the library and encouraged students to use them to study and to prepare — point being, if you knew the material and learned the style of questions to be asked, you'd do well.

If a professor is dumb enough to take his or her questions directly from a book and not work in any controls, then he or she has no one to blame when students find a way to answer those questions. Change it up.

 

I had a teacher in high school who taugh the same thing, word for word, every year. I had a friend who took the class the year before so I just borrowed here notes when I missed class and never missed a beat.

Some teachers are like this. The kids didn't cheat and they sure aren't learning anything from that class either.

 

I had teachers who handed out ahead of time a bunch of questions and some of them would be on the test as essays. It allowed the students to focus their studying.

I had one college teacher who even let us form study groups with the questions and even bring notes to the class -- including written out answers to the questions.