Interesting debate offered: Did these students cheat?

I know it's totally different. I just used the blue font to make sure nobody would think I was serious with my asking is it different.

 

I've had professors allow us to bring in one cheat sheet, with whatever notes we wanted on there.

 

I remember getting an index card. We could write down anything we want, but it had to fit on a small index card. Some guys needed magnifying lenses to read what they wrote.

 

I had an Econ. professor who did the same thing. One 5x7 index card for every test that we could put formulas, definitions, whatever we wanted on. He was more interested in us being able to apply facts to concepts and critical thinking than just memorizing the facts.

 

I disagree that breaking a law is necessarily unethical.
If I'm driving 43 mph in a 40 mph zone, that's not necessarily unethical.
I'm sure one of the board's lawyers could provide a quick explanation of malum in se vs. malum prohibitum.

 

I'm sure all of the students used the test questions in the instructor's edition to prepare.

The students knew the test would come from those questions. You have a combination of a lazy professor and unethical students.

 

So what should they study? Material they know won't be on the test?

 

I was traveling while all this went down, so I missed where we are with this story. As I originally understood it, it wasn't that the students had a copy of the manual, they got a copy of the test itself. If it's the latter, that's cheating. If it's the former, that's not.

The real travesty here is that: 1) this is the capstone class for business majors; 2) this guy is a glorified stringer who's frankly not qualified to teach this course (I've seen his resume); and 3) there are some 600 students in this section. This tells you how much this institution values good teaching.

I am a college prof and I run into this kind of a thing every now and then. I have some questions that I rotate through but that I try to keep out of circulation. Recently I had some students of a specific ilk -- won't go into details re: the "ilk," but it's a readily definable group -- just absolutely and universally nail one of these questions. In reading their responses, it was as if I was reading my answer key. Then I remembered that I'd let students rework that question (for extra points) in class a year or two ago. Clearly someone of that group from the past had made a photo of the question/answer from the past.

Now, was it cheating? Nah. Did it tick me off? Hell yes, since the rest of the class wound up being at a huge disadvantage with respect to partial credit/curves. So, I let everyone rework for 90% of the points they'd lost. And then I dropped that question from the rotation. And I'll write a fresh question for every test I make up for the rest of my career.

 

Now I get it.

 

Doc, they didn't have a copy of the test, they had access to the manual's test bank of 300 questions/answers. The prof composed his test from that test bank... because, as it seems, it's just too much work to compose his own test.

I mean, he and his TA's worked a whole FOUR DAYS to write the new test.

(And I think we can guess who did much of the work, given the prof's lazy-assed track record.)

 

Simply accessing the test bank isn't cheating. The instructor was a doofus for even raising that charge.

Now, I don't want to go too devil's advocate here, because I have little patience with the instructor/institution in this situation. It is often the case, however, that instructors who don't use test banks get hammered by students in end-of-term evaluations. It's not really an issue in my courses, which are at the masters/doctoral level and are statistics-intensive. But undergrads these days are notorious for punishing instructors whose exams don't perfectly mirror material presented in the text. If you're not on the tenure track, that kind of punishment can be the difference between having a job next semester or working at Subway [crossthread alert]. So laziness likely isn't the only reason one would go to a test bank.