This amazing viral video of a professor who caught 200 of his 600 students cheating is worth watching:
I’m sure you will all be surprised that these were business students, but in fairness, they are just watching what their Galtian overlords are doing, and wondering why they can’t get away with it like the banksters do.
Michael
What kind of candyassed professor gets upset over kids amassing a test bank? He needs to not be so fucking lazy next time, and scramble up the questions.
Dave
It’s a good, solid lesson for them all to learn. But holy shit, would I be pissed if I was one of the students who did it right and had to do a makeup at 7 am on a Monday.
Michael
The more I listen to this, the more he pisses me off.
“Protect the integrity of the university”? He makes a fucking outsized salary as students acquire stinking piles of debt just to rerun the same tests over and over and over again.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
I’m just impressed that the professor was paying that much attention. Most of the teachers my oldest has in high school can’t be bothered to do any kind of “monitoring.”
Crusty Dem
I’m sorry, if 200 of your students have the answers for your test, you’ve royally fucked up.
Moron.
Soprano2
I had an economics professor who would never let us keep our tests because he didn’t want them to end up in the file cabinets of frat houses.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Michael: So it’s the professor’s fault the kids cheated?
Michael
He’s whimpering about his last 20 years?
ROFLMAO
If he wants to instill some integrity, he’d have a bunch of poor kids come in and kick every business student in the nuts.
Dave
Wow…so the argument is that it’s the teacher’s fault for not making it harder for the students to cheat? As opposed to the basic idea that you aren’t supposed to cheat, regardless of the ease of doing so?
Hey, Goldman Sachs! It’s not your fault you fucked America over. It’s our fault for not making it harder for you to do so. Ethics, schmethics.
Michael
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
Test banking isn’t cheating. It is, however, a reflection on a fat, lazy fuck who collects a salary but can’t be bothered to revise his tests from semester to semester.
CT Voter
It’s an entertaining video, but I think the situation is far less clear cut than originally suggested.
He seemed to say to the students at the beginning of the semester that he made up the questions–so using a test bank as a study guide might not seem so far-fetched.
John Cole
@Michael: This is spoof, right?
Michael
@Dave:
Actually, it is. We’re big-brained primates, and are inclined to do that sort of thing when it benefits us.
There is no ethics system that has been proven to be incorruptible when one applies it to oneself. That’s why regulation and watchfulness are good things.
jeff
Looks like Michael is a bit defensive about something.
BGinCHI
Based on the world of American Business these geniuses are headed into, I’d say the cheaters have already learned the most valuable lesson: playing by the rules is for chumps.
Also, any capstone course that has 600 students is a degree from K-mart anyway. Rigor in a business school class? Please.
Plus, I like the admonition at the beginning that “all students are welcome to attend the live sessions.” Riveting, essential course material no doubt. I fucking guarantee that this guy is making double what his colleagues in English, Chemistry, and Bio are making.
Judas Escargot
@Soprano2:
I had an economics professor who would never let us keep our tests because he didn’t want them to end up in the file cabinets of frat houses.
Was this a small/medium sized New England engineering school in the mid 1980s? If so, then we had the exact same econ professor. (Or at least one that used that exact same phrase to justify us having to hand the tests back after we’d seen our grades).
His tests were always true/false, though, anyway– no real math. Most of us were just engineers, taking Macro and Micro to fulfill their social science requirement.
Wonder how many of my classmates ended up being quants?
Brick Oven Bill
The system was designed by The Founders to give citizens of Talent and Virtue a fighting chance against those of Wealth and Birth. Read Thomas Jefferson’s thoughts on education, and compare them with Affirmative Action Scholarships, Legacy Scholarships, and modern universities.
…to provide for the annual selection of the best subjects from these schools, who might receive, at the public expense, a higher degree of education at a district school; and from these district schools to select a certain number of the most promising subjects, to be completed at a university, where all the useful sciences should be taught. Worth and genius would thus have been sought out from every condition of life, and completely prepared by education for defeating the competition of wealth and birth for public trusts.
Today, the Wealth and Birth establishment has defined this as hate speech.
Go Teabaggers.
Michael
@John Cole:
Not really – I’ve never seen problems with test bank collectors. Never did it myself (too lazy to be able to do much other than cram), but knew people who did, and all I ever saw was that it caused them to focus in areas where instructors were biased in examination.
If the instructor was lazy enough to repeat some testing verbatim, then that was a bonus to the person who did the extra work. Most of the time, they were aware of the existence of the banks, and didn’t go verbatim.
MikeJ
Is it cheating to talk to people who took the class last semester?
It was a 50 question test, the students studied to learn the info to answer 700 questions. They know the information they were tested on. They learned stuff.
Where is the cheating?
Foobar
Just another example of a Librul Elitist Ivorytower-Dwelling Smarty-Pants Intellectual coming down on the cheating man.
Crusty Dem
One of my pet peeves in undergrad was professors who thought if they kept students from taking the tests home, they could reuse the same tests again and again (and where I went to school, most in the Dept of Engineering felt this way). One of the frats figured this out and by acquiring the questions (either by writing them down on a separate paper during the test or just remembering and writing them down) and avoiding the few profs that rotated tests, they owned the GPAs..
Try getting good grades on the bell curve when you’re competing with people who have the tests at home…
Dave
@Michael:
Well, there was watchfulness involved because he nailed them when the distribution came out all screwy.
I just think that this “we’re wired to cheat” stuff is so much bullshit that lowers us to the level of a chimp. If human can develop systems of rules and ethics, then we should be able to abide by them. The rules to cheating are simple; you get caught, you’re screwed. With that in place, I should be able to leave the damn answer key on my desk and expect my students to leave it be. And if they take it? Then the onus is on them for cheating, not on me for how I structure a test.
BR
I remember taking the intro business class as an undergrad. I was an engineering major and was taking my heaviest courseload that semester, and wanted something easy. The business school was ranked in the top five, so I figured it shouldn’t be that easy. I was wrong.
Over the course of the semester I spent a total of ten hours outside of lecture doing homework / studying for exams, which was roughly the amount of work I was doing daily for my other classes. In class discussions, the aspiring business students would suck up to the teaching assistant (MBA student) and talk about how great corporations are for society – when they weren’t complaining how hard it was. Since I was a grumpy, sleep-deprived engineer, I spent most of the time shooting them down by pointing out all the failures of our crony capitalist system. On the occasions that I got the MBA to admit that what I was saying was true, the aspiring business students looked at me like I had hiked up a cheek and farted.
James Hare
I just feel gypped whenever I read or watch things like this. All the time I was spending studying and doing work honestly throughout school seems like a waste. I almost feel like I should instruct my future children to cheat on tests constantly and help them in their cheating as much as possible. If all their fellow classmates are doing so, they’ll be a serious disadvantage if they choose to be honest.
If they have real evidence these students cheated, they should be expelled. The fact that they weren’t suggests the cheating isn’t as obvious as the professor makes it out to be.
I also really have a problem with a professor who uses test banks from a textbook manufacturer. Those should be used as suggestions only, as students can do exactly what was done here: get the test bank and study all the questions. To a certain degree you’ve got to appreciate the ingenuity of the students.
That and I don’t see how it’s “cheating” for the students to study the test bank and beat the test that way. They learned the material the professor chose to test them on. They didn’t bring extra materials to class. They may have colluded in their study, but study groups are part of college.
The real problem is one that happens on college campuses every day: administrators or professors get lazy and the students catch them on it. Because of the extreme imbalance of power the students pay for the administrative or faculty laziness.
Rommie
One thing I’m glad I never had to do was cheat in school. I didn’t need to, so it would’ve been stupid of me to take the chance of getting caught.
A lot of those goobers above didn’t need to cheat either, but the win-anyway-you-can mentality is strong in them, so they do it anyway.
From my experience, there is a line between righteous instructor anger about cheating swine, and over-the-top “Respect mah authoritah!” instructor power-trips. It doesn’t absolve cheating, it just makes both sides look bad when it happens.
prof
Getting a copy of a test bank is technically cheating. But it is also indicative of prof laziness.
Test banks aren’t public. Publishers try very hard to keep them out of students’ hands. It isn’t impossible for students to get them, but it does require some effort and forethought.
These kids knew what they were doing was probably not right. But students largely see college as a 4 yr hazing ritual whereby they jump through profs hoops until they get their diploma. I don’t blame the students, but they aren’t innocent little lambs.
Profs who use full test-banks without modification ARE lazy. I’ve got colleagues who do it, and they try to defend it–but those arguments ring hollow. If you use the same powerpoint slides and generate exams from the same test bank for four years in a row, you are mailing it in.
BGinCHI
@Brick Oven Bill: Your fucking stupidity boggles the mind.
You really don’t know anything, do you?
CT Voter
@BGinCHI: Yes, a capstone class with 600 students makes it sort of something less than a capstone class.
And unless there’s a strong faculty union there, this person is making a heckuva lot more than any faculty member outside of the school of business.
James E. Powell
and wondering why they can’t get away with it like the banksters do.
But they can get away with it. All they have to do is admit it, say they are sorry, and attend a four hour ethics class. They aren’t kicked out of school, they aren’t academically suspended, they don’t even flunk the class!
If the university wanted to maintain its integrity, it would make the case against each student and kick them out of school.
GregB
Breaking News:
Gary Condit is about to be found guilty of murdering Chandra Levy.
I can’t believe you aren’t covering the most important story of the year 2000.
Karmakin
The line between cheating and not cheating is sometimes a lot narrower than we like to think it is. Personally, I’ve used test/question banks before. They’re a great way to prepare for an exam/test, as you get used to the actual methodology of how the test is run, so when you’re actually doing it, it doesn’t seem so foreign. Of course, this is with teachers/professors who write brand new exams each time out.
I just don’t think this is any more “cheating” than any other type of pre-test/exam studying.
BR
@James E. Powell:
No, see, if they got away with it like the banksters did, then after the professor warned them about their irresponsibility, he would have announced that not only is he changing the rules to allow students to cheat, but he’s also going to take them all out for pizza and beer.
BGinCHI
@CT Voter: Sorry, but even on unionized campuses (like mine), Business profs make way more than everyone else.
The rationale is that pulling them out of lucrative careers in the private sector means having to pay them a lot.
It’s a sore spot on a lot of campuses where the B school isn’t very good (and where tuition isn’t higher to make up for these salaries).
Bella Q
What a rip off that I actually had to write essays on my college midterms and finals. If only I’d known about b school.
MikeJ
Since Kaplan sells practice tests, I wonder what the Post thinks of this story?
Zifnab
College (particularly business, medical, engineering, and law schools) and Wall Street have the same problem. Neither particularly care about the results. They only care about the top X% of applicants.
So if you comprehend 80% of the material, but the cut off line is 81%, they toss you out. If you bring in a $1 million account, but the cut off is $1.1 million, you can go find another job. A system that rewards exceeding your peers rather than meeting your goals will inevitably invite cheating.
Peter
Michael: Shut up.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
I’m really losing a fair amount of respect for the posters who are justifying the students here. I don’t imagine it matters much to you in the long run, but I figured you should know at the very least.
The professor is lying to himself, though, if he thinks that he’s going to be able to stop this in the future. It’s like the race between athletes who use PEDs and the organizations who test for them–you never win that race for good. The best you can hope for is to stay close.
zmulls
Really? The takeaway from this video is that the students were just doing what is expected and the teacher is fat, lazy and overpaid? Integrity is for suckers, and the expectation of integrity for bigger suckers?
I sort of assume there’d be a huge righteous BJ-style condemnation of the students, and a big thank you to the teacher.
I’m giving him the benefit of the doubt. I’m assuming he cares about the students who really want to learn, that he prepares the material for his lectures, that he keeps office hours and makes himself available to answer questions from students who really get into the material.
I’m a lot more inclined to give the benefit of the doubt to the teacher than I am the 200 budding George W. Bushes snickering about the test bank.
Michael
@Dave:
That is, after all, what we are – big brained chimps. We have biological and cultural propensities to look up to the wiliest chimp with the most stuff. He is the one, after all, who gets the most women, because he is more attractive to them; and conversely, we all want to be him and are willing to do the things necessary to be him.
But we can’t – when have oaths meant anything to people testifying? When have deep expressions of faith ever been a guarantee of truth? Ethical rules and regulations, such as they are, grew from the fact that we are social animals and have to engage in some level of cooperation to remain successful as a species.
This is why you have regulation in place – people cannot be trusted to follow everybody else’s rules.
MikeJ
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): The students learned the material. How did they cheat?
burnspbesq
@Judas Escargot:
That sounds like Jim Kenney. You a fellow Union grad?
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@James Hare:
Seems to me that if you’re only worried about beating the test, you’ve sort of missed the point of being in the class, no? Or am I just valuing concepts a little too much? I was always more interested in the how and why something worked than I was in learning how to game the system for a grade.
BGinCHI
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): This is why you don’t just give multiple choice tests and hope for the best. It’s a lazy practice.
Why not essays? Or term papers plus essay exams?
Too much grading? Then find another line of work or stop pretending your “discipline” is something rigorous that involves critical thinking.
For all the gnashing of teeth about schools of education (much of which is deserved), schools of business have gotten a free pass. Doesn’t anyone care what these students are being taught? Does any of the behavior we’ve seen in the business community come from this social practice?
sfbevster
Jeez, people. I’d nominate this guy for Sec Treas.
Brick Oven Bill
How does modern Wealth and Birth generate revenue?
In Weimar Germany, the government printed money, and paid for stuff. In Obama’s America, it is worse. The Federal Reserve creates money and gives it to their owners, the banks, at no cost. The banks, in turn, loan this free money to the government at something like 3%.
So Obama’s enablers with this latest $2 trillion or so just pocketed an annual income stream of around:
0.03 times $2 trillion equals $60 billion per year.
Imagine that, they are a profitable institution. What geniuses. Contrast this with the $27.6 billion per year in theoretical income tax revenue from raising the top income tax rates.
Now contrast this further with the work performed disproportionally by those of Talent and Virtue.
Work equals a force times a distance.
CT Voter
@BGinCHI: They trot out that argument in my system, as well, but everyone else tells them to go to Wall Street then, more or less.
Joseph Nobles
This stifling of academic innovation just means that Florida business graduates will be that much less able to compete in the business world. The students should sue the university for crippling their future incomes.
/parody
Mudge
The students got away with it just like the banksters..if they admit they cheated, then they can take the new midterm, stay in the course and have even a reference to the cheating removed from their transcripts if they take the 4 hour ethics course.
Cheating happens all the time. The professor just feels upset because his colleagues are all laughing at how naive he was. Using any written test bank is foolish and lazy.
The offer to admit guilt is a trick. Any charge of cheating based on statisics lead to a legal case against UCF in an eyeblink, so he graciously offers to let them confess without substantial penalty. In addition, the second exam will be used to identify the nonconfessors due to gross differences in the scores. Most confessors will have a gross difference in grade that will be overlain on the others. This probably wouldn’t hold up legally either. My guess is that anyone who does not confess will never be charged with anything.
In addition, he may ease the grief for the remaining students by removing the cheaters from the statistics and offering, for example, the non-cheaters the better of the two exams.
zmulls
Comedy = Tragedy + Time
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@MikeJ: They didn’t learn the material. They learned answers. There’s a significant difference between the two.
Bella Q
@zmulls: I’m inclined to allot the benefit of doubt in exactly that fashion as well. And I am likewise surprised at the response of some of the commentariat thus far.
jon
I’m having a hard time figuring out where the information gathering becomes cheating. Is Cliff’s Notes cheating? Is it cheating to look at old textbooks (libraries are full of them)? Is it cheating to ask students what the professor stresses in the tests? Is sharing notes a form of cheating?
There’s definitely a lot of gray in the black and white world of academic cheating. And even a test bank needs to be studied, so it’s quite possible that those who “cheated” will have an advantage over those who didn’t even with the new test. (Yeah, I’m not even fooling myself with that.) Still, I can’t see a clear line between what is cheating and what is making full use of available information. There’s a fuzzy line, but not a clear one.
Don
Yeah I’m having a hard time seeing the severe moral outrage here.
Rather than distilling the information into a custom-written test the school pulls questions out of a textbook publisher-provided question bank.
From what I understand of this, some students got their hands on the full list of test questions, from which some presumably small set of questions was picked and presented on the exam.
One of two things happened here: either the students reviewed and memorized all the questions & answers well enough to be able to pick them on the exam or the exam was presented in such a way as to allow the students to consult that test bank and find the question and use the right answer.
Is the first one cheating any more than learning the material out of the text fully? How could you learn those questions and answers well enough to vomit them up on a test and not actually learn the material? If you can then the material isn’t rigorous enough to warrant testing on.
If the test is presented in that way that allows flipping through the test bank then how is 827393 other forms of cheating not going on? That doesn’t excuse using the material that way but it seems foolish to think you can offer open-book exams on pre-written questions and have any assurance they are not compromised.
If this prof is just going to delegate the writing of the test to lab instructors anyway I dunno why they were using banks to begin with.
Steve
The fact that students were bragging afterwards about having all the answers in advance sort of demolishes the argument that this was just another form of “studying.” Have you ever felt so guilty about studying and being prepared for a test that you anonymously gave your professor a copy of your study materials the day after? Me neither.
oliver's Neck
Makes me glad that I teach philosophy.
Walker
When I was at Dartmouth, plagiarism and cheating could be grounds for expulsion — first offense. I was in a freshman writing seminar with a student who was booted (he managed to argue it down only to a suspension) after his first semester.
Cornell is much more lax, and I find myself sitting in on an Academic Integrity Hearing on a regular basis. It is amazing what these students think (incorrectly) that they can get away with. I am not saying we need something as draconian as what we had at Dartmouth, but you have to take a hard line on this crap.
Corner Stone
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
Teaching to the test is how two decades of students have been taught. Maybe more by now.
That’s how ISD’s are ranked.
CT Voter
@BGinCHI:
Answer: ’cause there’s 600 people in the class.
Follow-up question: how can you have a capstone class with 600 people?
Answer: we have to do it this way, otherwise it’d take too long for students to graduate.
And that’s the problem. IN the zeal to get people their degrees, colleges are mutating into degree generators.
Comrade Jake
This is basic cheating. The fact that folks here are trying to justify it is incredible.
They had the questions beforehand. Saying that the prof should have been smarter about making his test doesn’t suddenly transform that basic fact. Jesus fucking Christ.
BGinCHI
@CT Voter: I’d like to tell many of them where to go…..
Walker
I will say that we catch a lot of cheaters. In CS, a common practice is for a student to decompile a provided binary solution and pass it off as his/her own. We have ways of catching that. We tell students that we have ways of catching that. They still do not believe us.
Capri
Listening to the video – it sounds like the test questions come from the publisher of the textbook that is being used. If that’s the case, it has more to do with someone hacking into the publisher’s database than the professor’s laziness. Why else would he have notified the book’s publisher and why would their legal department be looking into it? The publisher certainly wouldn’t care if the professor, himself, wrote a bunchy of questions 20 years ago and though he could keep using them.
At the institution where I teach, one of the things you have to go over every single time you start a course is 1) What is considered cheating and 2) What the penalties will be if anyone is caught cheating. It’s probably the same everywhere, and if the professor specifically told the students that test banking is not allowed, then they’ve been warned and the students who cheated should bear the full consequences.
Karmakin
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): Indeed. I agree. The problem is that even the schools don’t really care about how much you’ve actually learned, all they care about is the grade. Thus is the problem with modern academics.
Actually gauging and measuring how much is actually learned is something much more difficult, and often much more subjective.
BGinCHI
@zmulls:
Brick oven Bill = head + up his ass
Jim C
@Bella Q:
Me too!
We had a test/syllabus file in our fraternity, but as a history major its business class richness was worthless to me.
OTOH, I had a professor who would hand out his exam essay questions 3-5 days before the test, explaining that he wanted to know what we had learned, not great reams of blue book bullshit.
Mnemosyne
@Michael:
Actually, that’s not how chimps work at all. Anthropologists have figured out that, while the alpha chimp is running around pounding his chest, the females are sneaking off with the lower-status males instead.
Your “theory” is based on bad science from 50 years ago. We know much, much more about primates now and we know that your simplistic view is, quite simply, completely wrong.
Corner Stone
If I were one of the 400 students alleged to NOT have cheated I would be pretty righteous by the end of that lecture.
MikeJ
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): Let’s use a grade school example. You get a test bank for your upcoming history exam, learn that the proper answer to “When did Columbus stumble across the new world?” You memorize the answer, 1492.
Did you learn the material that was taught in class or did you just memorize the answer to the test? Did you cheat because somebody told you that on a test about Columbus there was a chance you might be asked about 1492?
Southern Beale
A “test bank”? They have “test banks” now? Really?
I went to a teeny tiny liberal arts college. There were more people in my high school graduating class than enrolled in my entire college. So “test banks” are not something I know about.
But I know about cheating. Oh yes. I used to type term papers for money, and I had a really good business going. You figured out pretty quick who couldn’t write for shit and who could. There was this one kid, bless his heart, who was just this side of illiterate. Maybe that’s unfair, not illiterate, maybe he was good at math or something, but he couldn’t string three sentences into a coherent paragraph to save his life. And then all of a sudden one day he could. For a final term paper. There was just so much work put into this thing I was astonished.
I showed it to my best friend, who also had a thriving term paper business. But her clients were graduate students. And damn if this paper wasn’t from a graduate thesis she had typed up the previous year for someone. She recognized it right away.
So, long story short. Did I tell his professor? You’re damn right I did. I worked fucking hard in college, worked my ass off. No way was I going to have my degree cheapened by some asshole cheater.
BGinCHI
@Corner Stone: Certainly not in all (or many) disciplines.
There is a clear-cut difference here between those who teach to tests and those who teach skills and critical thinking and substantive material and then rigorously test on it.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@BGinCHI: You’ll find no one more ready to rail against Colleges of Business than me. Their instructors make nearly 3 times what I do, and I do considerably more work than they do in the classroom with far fewer resources. But that doesn’t justify what these students did. Lazy teachers don’t justify lazy students.
aimai
Makes interesting viewing along with this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed by “Ed Dante” who claims to make 66 thousand a year writing term papers, MA theses and etc… for pay.
In that multi comment thread all possible attitudes towards cheating and faking are represented. Dante’s students, he claims, are basically either totally unable to comply with a basic level of standard English (they are foreign students) or they are upper class or returning students who are getting a credential in order to increase their earning potential and who are entering fields (or continuing on in fields) in which being able to do independent research and writing are irrelevant or can be foisted off on someone lower down on the food chain. Its worth reading the article and the comments to get a sense of how angry consumers/students are that they are being asked to do any work and how disgusted professors/TA’s are that lousy admissions and retention policies make policing fraud a thankless and even dangerous task.
When I was teaching I caught a kid plagiarizing. I spent hours of my own time proving it but as far as I know nothing was done. He flunked my course but then what? When each student’s financial contribution to the school is so great the pressure is on the school to retain the student and his money. The cost to instructors for rocking the boat can be high.
Also: I think people are also misunderstanding the Professor’s attitude towards the “Test Bank” or what a test bank means when 200 students avail themselves of it. Working on the kinds of questions which will be on the exam is a time honored way of studying for a test. But when one or more kids puts together a test bank and sells it to the rest of the students that is out and out cheating and of no value to the individual’s education.
burnspbesq
@Walker:
Ditto. I spent my freshman year at Washington and Lee, when it was still all-male. Really simple honor code: “A gentleman does not lie, cheat, or steal, and does not tolerate those who do.” Only one sanction: expulsion. And heavy secrecy. You would not see somebody around for a week, or you would see his stuff being loaded into his parents’ car, and you would what had happened.
BGinCHI
@CT Voter: Yes, yes, and yes.
This isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
It’s part of the educational factory they’ve created. Hell, I’d be shocked if people weren’t cheating (not that I condone it). It’s a correspondence course.
Lori
To make it fair for students, ALL previous test questions and correct answers should be made public. That way, ALL students will get the same advantage from previous tests, and students will equally learn how to study for this teacher. Purpose of the tests are to make sure students have learned the material. By showing students what questions the teacher thinks are most important to know answers to, the teacher will be even more effective. Doesn’t make sense to rewrite all the questions, or to only have students with individual contacts with previous students to be able to learn what the teacher thinks is important. Better to do it my way, than to waste school, teacher, and student time doing police work
Lolis
I kind of agree that this professor is a fucker. He just uploads power point presentations and then doesn’t even write his own test questions? Sounds like a Kaplan robot would be as good of a professor as him.
I don’t think the students cheating can use his laziness as an excuse. They should be expelled or at the very least put on academic probation. The deal he arranged for them was very sweet indeed. It pretty much negates the whole rant.
adolphus
I think some of you are missing something here. The test bank in question is not a collection of past exams but a list of questions developed by the text book publishers to accompany a specific text or set of texts. If you do not have permission from the publisher to access these copyright protected and (not particularly well, apparently) secure test banks you are hacking into a someone’s database and committing theft. Even if they were passed along to students by someone who had legal access, that person would be breaking the terms of agreement for access and possibly breaking the law. This is why he speaks of the text book publishers contemplating legal action.
Granted I am reading between the lines, but he also says that non-cheating students have dropped dime on the others, so I assume he has more to go on here than statistical anomalies.
I think relying on test banks from publishers can be lazy, though I have used them sparingly in the past teaching history survey courses.
Brick Oven Bill
Anyway, the best answer is to end the Federal Reserve, or at least let Ron Paul and the United States Marine Corps audit it. Ron should get help from that Teabagging accountant former Congressional hopeful from Upstate New York.
Another answer is to participate in Teabagging activities. As an incentive to participate in our movement, at our barbeque yesterday, this blonde baker female had a few drinks and then started cleaning the house. It really was cool. This is not unusual behavior for Teabaggers.
Contrast the filth of the aftermath of the Obama inauguration with the cleanliness of Glenn Beck’s rally.
Bill E Pilgrim
@John Cole:
I don’t know but I could swear I saw that comment of his somewhere on the Internet before.
MikeJ
@oliver’s Neck:
In college I got caught looking into the soul of the kid next to me.
OK, when Woody Allen told it is was Metaphysics. You just didn’t set me up properly.
BR
Maybe the professor should just take the students to see Inside Job.
Of course, with the rot as deep as it is these days, the students will probably see the film as a how-to guide on doing bad shit and getting away with it.
Fat Tony
George W. Bush graduated from both Yale and Harvard.
Just thought I’d toss this in.
Michael
@BGinCHI:
That would require actual work. Ick.
Far better to have students incur high 5 figure student loan debts for gargantuan seminar courses and warmed over bubble form testing. It is a far better value for the providers that way.
ricky
“The days of finding a new way to cheat the system are over.” Richard Quinn
“If you have to give birth you’re going to have to give birth in the exam room….because its going to have to take a signed hand delivered note from God for you to get out from taking this mid term exam.” Richard Quinn
Christ, when is he going to threaten them with double secret probation. Oh, he is leaving that up to Dean Wormer.
Mnemosyne
@Don:
Sorry, how is this different from, say, stealing the high school math teacher’s edition of the textbook and “studying” the answer key? Or are you saying that doing that isn’t cheating, either?
BGinCHI
@Karmakin: Please don’t generalize.
Depends on the field of study. The Humanities work differently, for example.
Southern Beale
@aimai:
Over at Guru.com there are tons and tons of “assignments” up for bid that are term papers. Some rich kid would rather pay someone else to write their term paper with daddy’s money.
Free hand of the market, y’all. Huzzah.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@MikeJ: This ain’t grade school, and the questions on that test were (hopefully) of a significantly different nature than ones that ask you to memorize a date. Why are you so bound and determined to justify this?
Corner Stone
@BGinCHI: To be clear I was referring to students not yet in college. That was the reason I mentioned ISD’s, Independent School Districts.
Public schools have taught to the test since I was in school, lo those many years ago.
BGinCHI
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): I agree. What I’m saying is that it’s endemic to much (all?) of what b schools do.
This is a cheating example, but it’s more than that. Let’s talk causes and systemic failures.
TR
@Dave:
Seriously. How the fuck can you watch that and side with the goddamn cheaters?
Cat
@Steve:
This was probably a student who didn’t use the question bank and turned it in when they realized how it screwed up the distribution was.
The University made their own bed with this. 600 student sections and the prof giving exams from publishers test banks isn’t teaching, its churning out profit for the university.
The exam room should have proctors in it, I’m assuming they don’t allow you to take the exam at home, so the students just learned to the test.
I was expecting actual cheating, like hacking the test servers or tiny wireless devices.
Southern Beale
Well, now y’all made me Google “test bank.”
Holy fucking crap. This is big business! No wonder students think there’s nothing wrong with it. If it’s available for sale it MUST be okay, right? That’s the way our capitalist system works, right? Food in the grocery store is always healthy, drugs from the pharmaceutical companies are always safe, amiright? If money can be made from it, it can’t be bad!
That’s the general sentiment I seem to be getting for today’s youth, at least.
adolphus
@adolphus:
I should have noted that these test banks almost always come with the correct answer noted clearly. Even essay questions often have the main points listed in bullet form. So it isn’t as simple as having the questions. They are likely to have the answers, too.
As I said, though, my experience is in history, not Business.
ChrisNYC
Yep, definitely only business students cheat.
http://www.abcpapers.com/subjects.shtml
They’re probly perverts too, like the TSA workers. College students and civil service workers are clearly the problem.
DB
I took one particular class in college and there was a “study session” run by the TAs a few nights before the final. I didn’t go because I had to work that night. Found out after the exam, that everybody who went got practice exams (with answers) that were nearly identical to the actual final. Too bad there was no youtube back then, or you might have seen a righteous rant delivered to the professor by yours truly.
Why would they use a “test bank” for their exams, anyway? Laziness? Seriously.
And remember: Han shot first and Kirk rewrote the Kobayashi Maru.
Erik Vanderhoff
@BGinCHI: Isn’t there a management style book called “First: Break All the Rules”?
BGinCHI
@Erik Vanderhoff: How about: “Business School, Investment or Ponzi Scheme”?
BR
@ChrisNYC:
If and when literature majors cheat, learn that that’s how to do things, and then graduate with phony diplomas, they don’t end up on Wall Street with the power to fuck over billions of people. Business majors do.
simonee
Yes, cheating is wrong, people! But for goodness sake, if you’re going to lift questions from a test bank and present it to your class as your test (and do this for, say, 20 years), be prepared.
adolphus
@simonee:
He was prepared. He caught them didn’t he?
Corner Stone
@Lolis:
IMO, the reason the “deal” is offered is because they actually do not know who all cheated. And are looking to fill in the gaps.
piratedan
@Brick Oven Bill:
well that’s gonna happen when 1.8 million show up to your party compared to 87,000….. there are probably gonna be a few more napkins and paper plates strewn about than normal.
Karmakin
@simonee: Here’s what I think happened. I think that this is something that’s been done on a year to year basis, basically on purpose, and was passed down year to year to connected individuals. This year, someone decided to let the cat out of the bag and tell/sell it to all of their friends. As the “cheating” is now done by too many people, now they crack down on it.
Corner Stone
@adolphus: IMO, he caught them after a pissed off student dropped the dime on the whole scam.
Then he went back and did his analysis and his puffery before the class.
In 21 years he’s never given the cheating lecture? Then wtf does he think has been happening?
If he’s never caught a group doing this in 21 years then he didn’t catch this group either.
lacp
Hey, he fucked up – he trusted them.
Nutella
An engineering prof I know used to give pretty much the same test each time he gave a course but he had a program to generate different numbers for the inputs/outputs of each year’s problem sets. That way no one who got hold of the previous year’s test could just copy the answer.
Some students complained that it wasn’t fair that they couldn’t copy from last year’s test. (The fraternities all had the old tests on file.)
MikeJ
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): If they weren’t writing essays, the exam wasn’t any more probing than a grade school test.
I simply don’t see how memorizing the short answer to a question is cheating. The students cheated by keeping the information in their brains? How dare they learn the information they’re being tested on!
Marc
The level of bullshit justification here is extremely high.
First, the same excuses used in this thread would justify stealing from someone who didn’t lock their door. I see a lot of defensiveness here: the assertion that someone is far and lazy, that they never bothered to change their own things for 20 years, yada yada yada. Smells like excuses to me.
Second, you can make a very challenging multiple choice exam. Really. There are also some topics where they even make sense.
I’ve used a variety of strategies with students; I learn more about what they know from short-answer formats, but the grades turn out to be identical for 90% of the students in the class (comparing scores on both types of exams for the same students in the same classes.)
One secret is to have huge databases of such questions that you tweak all of the time – but if you’re relying on the publisher you can’t do that.
Third, there really is something wrong with 600 student sections; the quality of what you can do drops off dramatically above around 100-150 in a lecture format (people won’t interact.) This is tied to the useless online teaching model as well. Real teaching costs real money and involves paying people to spend real time with their students figuring things out.
BGinCHI
@BR: Hank Paulson, majored in English at Dartmouth. But it was in ’68, so I assume everyone was high.
Not proud of having to write that, but it certainly does happen.
And you know who painted watercolors when he was younger….?
ricky
What a spirited debate we have here.
So what are the ethics of providing a 600 student section class (multiply the per hour tuition paid by the students
and add the state per contact hour reimbursement or othe formula used by Florida) and calling it an education?
adolphus
@Corner Stone:
They will never know who all cheated. He notes the imprecision of the statistical modeling they are relying on. As a teacher the only thing worse than letting someone get away with cheating is to punish someone for cheating who didn’t. I think he did the only thing he could do considering all he had were statistical evidence and the word of students who likely didn’t name names but complain generally.
Note what he doesn’t include in the deal:
1. He does not say what will happen if it becomes clear who obtained the test bank q&a (possibly) illegally and started this whole business.
2. Makes no promise, because he can’t, that the textbook publishers will not prosecute or otherwise take action if it is determined laws were broken or copyright violations were committed. Think they won’t? Recall the RIAA and the prosecution of music piracy? The major textbook publishers can be just as protective and just as vindictive as a lesson to future scofflaws.
BGinCHI
@Marc:
Bingo.
Peter
@Corner Stone: Well, considering that the course average was a full grade and a Hal. Higher than every single other time he’s taught this course, presumably it either hasn’t been occurring before, or at the very least it hasn’t been that widespread.
Seriously, I doubt that this is the first time he’s caught a cheater. But I have absolutely no trouble believing that this is the first time he’s had to give a lecture on it to the whole class because 33% of them did. Jesus.
Bill E Pilgrim
@BR:
Oh I don’t know, Amity Shlaes has a bachelor’s degree in English and she serves as a first-rate propagandist for crackpot right wing economics in action, with some people even mistaking her for an economist.
Not strictly “on Wall Street” no, but she might as well be. I know what you’re saying of course but, the power of the pen and so on.
licensed to kill time
@lacp: extra points for the Animal House ref :)
waldenpond
Not impressed by the guy at all. He gave the impression he has favored students by clarifying he didn’t want them to ask for additional favors. He’s upset by their cheating him personally but not enough in a general sense as he demonstrated by going behind the backs of the ethical students to make a deal ensuring the cheaters wouldn’t suffer the reasonable and typical penalty of being expelled.
They did get away with it. All they have to do is doze through and ethics seminar. boohoo.
Southern Beale
@ricky:
Yes. Wondering what racial/ethnic/political group we can blame the “cheating is morally ambiguous” mind-set on?
/sarcasm
WarMunchkin
A few points…
The reason why the bimodal distribution was so important isn’t because of something inherent in bimodality, it’s because the central limit theorem states that with high N, the distribution converges to a normal distribution. I thought it would have been nice for him to say that. Several times, in small classes, bimodal or polymodal distributions will be present, but that doesn’t really reflect much about cheating or anything, just that there are a subset of students who are at a completely different level. With a larger class size, you expect the distribution to converge to a Gaussian.
Second, looking at a bank of questions is not cheating. Looking at *the* questions, is. I know that’s hard to stomach for a lot of people, but have you ever done practice questions in preparing for an exam? I just had to take a standardized test, and I must have practiced on over 1500 different questions that were from past tests, from textbooks, from people’s imaginations, and ones I made up myself. To use a bank of questions from a textbook isn’t really cheating – unless I’m misinterpreting this, it’s basically looking at the questions at the back of every chapter and doing them, and then getting caught….studying? In high school, I used to do practice on problems given in the textbook for every test – and then find them on my test later.
There’s something else I want to know – since when did not making up your own test questions become acceptable?
Fat Tony
Whether the professor is a sniveling douche bag or not – doesn’t bother me.
Whether the cheating students are sniveling douche bags or not – doesn’t bother.
Is life.
That people could actually defend these actions certainly explains how Bush had two terms as POTUS. Also explains Palin’s rise to stardom.
PeakVT
I started read Cheating Culture a few years ago but put it down because it was so infuriating. Nothing has changed, and nothing will change until the rewards system is changed.
dr. bloor
@MikeJ:
Do you really not see the distinction between “learning the material” and “learning the exam answers?”
robert green
the professor gives them a free out. just say “sorry” and you get NOTHING–not even a fucking slap on the wrist. i assume i don’t have to point out that teaching these pieces of shit ethics for four hours is not going to change their behavior, but here’s what it will do–assure that some of them get jobs with goldman sachs (currently under grand jury investigation for insider trading, and if taibbi is to believed–and he should be–for being the absolute most execrable pieces of HUMAN FUCKING GARBAGE on our planet bar none including a senescent idi amin) or JP Morgan, or maybe AIGFP. also too, as they say around here, i’m sure moody’s is hiring.
so this professor is worthless. he has a worthless job. he’s a worthless person.
my father was a professor for 30 plus years at very good liberal arts schools. he caught people cheating. they were expelled. but you know, my father and the schools at which he taught were creating ethical minds, not randian vermin whose sole purpose post-graduation was to systematically loot and destroy all that is good in western society. so in that sense his job was different than that of a typical MBA professor, whose job it is to wonder why these callow fuckwads coming through his doors every year are going to be making more than him in their first year of post-graduation.
c’est la guerre. i’d say fuck them all, but it’s too late–they’ve fucked us.
Ash Can
I’m absolutely stunned at the people in this thread excusing the students and putting the blame on the professor. I mean, beyond words.
Holy fucking shit.
And these same commenters are going to be reaming right-wingers/Republicans/pundits in other threads about their lack of ethics and basic decency.
This thread is an eye-opener indeed.
Michael
@ricky:
You’re not supposed to notice that, nor are you supposed to look at the return on educational dollars spent or the sweetheart deal previously given to private student loan lenders or the absence of bankruptcy protection for student loan borrowers.
By God, these high dollar edumacations are a privilege, a PRIVILEGE, and these kids need to appreciate it.
Walker
@ricky:
Many of us here agree that this is crap. This does not justify cheating.
adolphus
@Corner Stone:
Watch the video again. He runs the statistical analysis as he claims he has been doing for a long time, notices the anomaly which begins to investigate. Then one student drops off the complete test bank. Then numerous students drop dime, not just one. (Unknown is whether these students ratted before or after the investigation into the anomaly or the test bank was dropped off. Were they asked by the TA’s or did they volunteer, we don’t know.)
I admit that he is lazy for relying solely on verbatim test banks for his mid-term and I really can’t say he would have caught the students without the squealers. But then you can’t say he wouldn’t or that he wasn’t prepared, either.
The irony is that if he spent as much time creating unique exams as he did running the results through a statistical meat grinder he probably could have prevented a good amount of this. But cheating is still cheating.
MattR
Granted I went to a “top tier” university, but if I ever found out that any of my professors were depending on a company to provide exam questions I would expect that professor to be fired immediately.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@ricky:
First of all, even if we grant that the system is itself flawed, that doesn’t justify cheating, so let’s just call that part of this discussion bullshit right from the get-go, okay?
Now, as far as the issue of 600 student class sections are concerned, yes, they’re bullshit, and I found it telling that the prof in this class didn’t say he’s been teaching the class, but rather that he’s been providing course content for all these years. It shows how he thinks of his job, and how this College of Business thinks of its mission.
But please don’t throw tuition into the mix here, okay? Individual students, assuming they’re paying their own way and aren’t receiving either state or federal aid–which are really easy to get in Florida–only cover between 25 and 40% of the cost of keeping them in school. That’s worst case scenario. Most students put considerably less money toward the total cost of their educations, which is only part of the reason that the consumer model of education is hopelessly flawed.
Ian
One solution to the arms race: a public, advertised exam bank for students. The undergraduate engineering society runs one, and the profs know about it. It encourages profs to write original exams (though of course some are lazy), and it makes sure that every student has an equal opportunity to prepare for the exam by seeing the style of questions that the prof is likely to ask. A good idea both from the perspective of good profs and good students.
I teach philosophy. You’ve never caught a plagiarist? I seem to catch one every class or two I teach, and I feel like I’m only catching the obvious ones.
Peter
@MikeJ: I had a larger post typed up, but then Safari crashed and lost it, so you get this:
If the students had broke into the professor’s home to acquire an advance copy of the exam and answers, would that also not be cheating?
ChrisZ
ITT: It’s not cheating if I don’t like the way the teacher gives tests!
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Michael: Higher educations in Florida public universities are not high-dollar by any stretch of the imagination. But go on acting as though it somehow justifies the students’ actions. Keep fucking that chicken as long as it squawks.
sukabi
@jon: your making use of “available information” comment is funny… because the test bank information presumably is on a secure server that someone had to hack to get… the test was stolen, the students who used the test bank test, used stolen information to pass the test, and you don’t see anything wrong with that?
if the test was in the Prof’s home and someone broke in, copied it and distributed / sold it to their classmates would you find anything wrong with that? Was the Prof just being lazy?
Mnemosyne
@MikeJ:
Seriously? Getting hold of the answer key for a test and memorizing the answers now counts as “studying” and shouldn’t be penalized?
Michael
@dr. bloor:
As I understand it, there were 700 potential questions for a 50 question test.
Yes, I’d say they learned the material.
Slowbama
@Ash Can: Yes, it is truly an eye-opener. Excuse me, but I have to go shower now. Too much sleaze here for me.
Bill E Pilgrim
@Ash Can:
Actually even weirder is that some of these opinions seem really similar to each other.
Did someone get ahold of this thread and circulate it before John posted it??
John B.
Way back when I was in school, doing a math and a cs degree, most of my teachers would hand out the previous year’s tests as study materials.
That never made the current test much easier.
I just don’t think that anybody in this little drama comes out looking too good: asshole students who think that they can get away with cheating, and lazy professors who download their source and test materials and use it again and again, year after year.
Tonal Crow
@Michael:
And waterboarding isn’t torture.
Amanda in the South Bay
I’m afraid I don’t quite get all the meta gnashing of teeth over ethics-if the test questions were available to the public, then there’s no cheating, just a lazy professor. That’s the issue-if the testbank questions were password protected somehow, then yeah, that’s cheating, otherwise…well, I don’t see what the big deal is. Students are usually encouraged to use those annoying online supplements that come with textbooks.
rufflesinc
winner! This is how my undergraduate university does it. They not only allow and encourage test banks, but the larger courses (in physics and engineering) will post several semesters worth of old exams for students to cut their teeth on.
Peter
Also it may not be a 600 student section. It could be 600 students broken down into multiple sections.
dr. bloor
@Michael:
First, refresh your memory about the differences in the two distributions the professor referred to in the video. Then go learn something about sampling theory and test construction. Weren’t those topics included in any of the test banks you’ve used in the past?
patrick II
Does this mean we shouldn’t buy the Kaplan’s SAT book that uses previous years questions to study?
Michael
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
A Bachelor’s Degree is still going to be about 30K. If you’re living there, add about 20-30K.
That, of course, doesn’t include the value of the tax subsidy part of the budget.
WarMunchkin
I’d also like to make the what should be the obvious point that banksters defrauded millions of people, held the economy hostage and were rewarded for it because they were in a position of power and could demand it. These kids are getting off in a show of mercy.
dr. bloor
@Bill E Pilgrim:
No, it’s just that ethically tone-deaf folks tend to sing the same tune.
dr. bloor
@patrick II:
Those questions have been released by the test publisher.
Peter
@patrick II: What Bloor said, and also add that since the publisher has released them, presumably they are not included in future test banks.
Judas Escargot
@burnspbesq:
That sounds like Jim Kenney. You a fellow Union grad?
Alas, no: My undergrad was at WPI. Best known as “the school Dean Kamen dropped out of”, though we can claim Robert Goddard and Robert Stempel as alumni.
Still surprised how many fellow alumni I keep running into in real life, given that it was a fairly small school when I was there.
Speaking of tests: I remember senior year there, Communications Theory II, last class before the final exam. The dialogue went something like this:
My kind of professor.
adolphus
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
I am new to Florida, but as I understand the Bright Futures program, it is quite likely many if not most of these students aren’t paying anything for their educations, including housing and texts. Also, as an out-of-state PhD student I paid less per credit for classes than I did 20 years ago at a state school in MD. Florida tuition is kept artificially low by state government.
I am wide open to correction here as I am not up on the intricacies of this program and I know they have had to cut back recently. But this program coupled with the bad economy and stinginess in Tallahassee have made 600 student class sizes and online learning even more likely.
None of that justifies cheating, but all of these students could have chosen a smaller B-School if they wanted smaller class sizes.
Michael
@dr. bloor:
Like I said above, I was always too lazy to use test banks – between the laziness and the semesters of heavy drinking, skirt chasing and sports gambling, I don’t know where I’d have found the time to review test bank questions in my 4 hours of drunken cram time the night before.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Peter: The way most of these classes work in my experience is that there are 600 students in the class, and you can access the lectures from either the classroom or from some remote location online. The professor has a number of GA’s who run labs, answer questions, and handle the grunt work. The prof is the instructor of record, but has very little interaction with the students individually. There’s a reason why so many business students get letters of recommendation from their English teachers as opposed to their business professors–we actually know who they are.
ricky
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
So what are the ethics of charging the students and the taxpayers whatever is paid for one hour-long three-times a week class where there are 600 students and calling it education? And don’t cheat by looking up the answer.
Michael
@adolphus:
All for an eensy-weensy increase in their low, low tuition rates.
Jamey: Bike Commuter of the Gods
@MikeJ: Ka-ZINNNNG!
Mnemosyne
@Michael:
So stealing the questions and memorizing the answers is A-OK as long as you can claim you learned the material in the course of your theft and rote memorization?
Because, yes, all indications from this story are that the answers were stolen, which is why the professor talked about the textbook publisher possibly taking legal action against the students.
Mnemosyne
@ricky:
This is the problem, isn’t it? You think that if an organization cheats you, it’s ethically fine for you to cheat them in return.
That’s like arguing if Target screws you on a return, you should get to shoplift from them with impunity because, hey, they cheated you first!
scav
mmmph, this thread actually shines about as depressing a light on the state of ‘Mercan value and respect for intellect as a tea-party.
QDC
@Amanda in the South Bay:
It seems likely that the bank of questions was obtained through illegitimate means. If it can be freely downloaded and is intended for student consumption, then there’s clearly no foul in using it to study, but clearly the Professor thought the questions were secret.
Operating under the assumption that it was ill-gotten, there is still the question of what individual students knew. A comment on the video claims that the professor claimed that he wrote his own questions. If I received a list of test questions from the publisher in an email from a fellow student, with no indication it was illegitimately obtained, and had no reason to think it was used in constructing the test, I would likely regard it was useful study material and not as cheating.
If the material was watermarked confidential or “Instructor Material Only,” then I would regard it as cheating and not use it.
If the material was initially stolen, hacked, etc., but then distributed in a manner that gave no indication of it’s origins and was passed to a large portion of the class, then I think you just have to throw the exam out and try to punish the students who actually acted with bad intent.
I’d love to know the actual facts of the case.
Soprano2
@Judas Escargot:
No, it was a small liberal arts college in the Midwest in the early 80’s. His tests were hard, too – confusing multiple choice questions and plenty of essays. I took to figuring out the answer to the question before reading the choices, and still sometimes I couldn’t figure out the right answer. He was also fair – he once threw out an essay question because 22 of 24 students got it wrong, so he said his teaching must have been at fault because he knew not that many of us were that clueless. LOL
ricky
@Ash Can:
I am absolutley stunned that anyone can watch the video and come away with anything but contempt for the jackass on camera.
Forget the students and the issue of cheating. This guy is a total prick. The only saving grace is he could teach another 10 years at UCF and probably still not make what they paid the football coach when he had a 4-8 season. And that guy probably cheats all the time. If he did not, he would not have the job.
FYI, the head coach makes $1.3 to 1.9 million per year. His overall record since 2004 is 42-44.
ChrisNYC
@BR: “If and when” literature majors cheat? Do you really believe that you can judge someone’s ethics by their college curriculum? Should we just say if you own a calculator that computes IRR, you’re suspect? Or how about the test is whether you know what EBIDTA stands for? Does having to take lab courses mean that you’re ethical? Big Pharma must be a veritable ethics bastion. Also, no English major has ever held a position of power and used it corruptly?
Listen, I get it. I get the anger at bankers. I’m not one but I’ve known plenty and yeah, gross soulless vapid people lots of them. But wow this seems like a really poor source of comfort.
I was really hoping that one of the things to come out of the financial crisis would be a recognition that greed and “winning” at almost any cost is lionized in most of our culture. That turn supposedly happened in Japan when they went through their lost decade. Kids said, “Screw this. I don’t need a $6000 Fendi bag.” All the real estate buyers who were gleeful because their house prices were grossly inflated were also part of the problem and not every one of them was tricked into bad mortgages. Geez, even with Madoff — his investors wanted in because they wanted the illusory 30% returns. It’s not just bankers who think the bigger the house, the bigger the ummm …. success.
Lavocat
I wonder how many of the students feel lucky enough to avoid having to take “the deal”.
Talk about high stakes poker!
adolphus
@Michael:
Well yes. That’s how it works. You want cheap educations, you go to a huge school with huge class sizes in which the prestigious professor doesn’t even know your name. Or, for more money, sometimes lots more money, you can choose a school with lower teacher/student ratios and classes capped at 25-30 or lower and learn from a professor who takes pride in actually being a teacher.
Again, isn’t that how it works, and quite frankly should work? Or am I misunderstanding your snark?
ricky
@Mnemosyne:
No. I said nothing nor suggested anything of the sort. I asked about the ethics of the course. I did not mention cheating.
WarMunchkin
@Mnemosyne:
No, it isn’t. I don’t think that’s what the other commenter was saying, though. I think said commenter was responding to another commenter who was saying that by studying from the test bank, students are only learning answers to the questions as opposed to “the material”. The commenter you’re rebutting is arguing that in the limit as the number of questions you “learn to answer” goes to infinity, you’ve basically learned the subject, a perspective I happen to agree with, because if you’re answering and going over 700 questions about the material, chances are you’re actually learning it. I don’t think the statement was meant to justify “theft”.
Peter
@ricky: What exactly did he say that was prickish? Seriously.
ricky
@Southern Beale:
The answer on my test bank says to blame it on Obama.
If it is multiple choice and includes and answer with Rahm, there might be an acceptable muliple answer.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
@Michael:
As much as a Monkey (monkey analogy so you can understand this) “knows” how to count to 20 by pressing buttons on a screen.
There’s a huge difference between knowing that Answer A goes with Question A and knowing WHY Answer A is the answer.
One caveat though: let me say that you could possibly be right, given the suggested laziness of this professor. If he’s teaching “triva” and not knowledge (like some teachers do: i.e. what year did this thing happen. What’s the name of the top 3 guys who did said thing, etc) then the students might have learned what the teacher was teaching just by studing 700 Q&A’s.
ChrisNYC
Also, too, a lot of the quants who created the crazy financial products came out of math and engineering departments. We need to purge those bastards too, if we’re serious here. I would recommend you watch your wallet if the person you’re talking to knows how to do the proof showing that the square root of 2 is irrational.
adolphus
@WarMunchkin:
Then they should score equally well on the retest, right? I would be interested to see if this actually happens. My guess would be no.
MattR
@QDC: This sums it up pretty well for me. I have not watched the video or dove into all the details so I don’t know if this has been discussed, but I wonder how many of those students were pleasantly surprised to see that all the exam questions came from the test bank they received beforehand. If the professor had in fact previously stated that he writes his own questions, did the students think/know in advance that they were getting the actual questions beforehand or did they think they were getting a study guide? If it was the latter, I don’t see how you can punish those students in any way (which may be why the professor was so willing to offer them a deal instead of going to the dean)
Stillwater
Is there any irony-value in pointing out that most B-school students vote GOP, which bills itself as the party of individualism and personal responsibility?
daveNYC
Specifically, he rewrote the Kobayashi Maru scenario in a subtle way so that he could win, not in the ham-fisted moronic way shown in the movie.
ajesquire
I’m less offended by the cheating than I am with the Professor’s pathetic 15-minute bluff.
“We’ll know who you are by Friday. But help us out and confess anyway. And by definition we’ll also know those of you who didn’t cheat. But guess what? You’re taking the test again anyway.”
I’d love to be in this guy’s weekly poker night.
ricky
@Walker:
“Many of us here agree that this is crap. This does not justify cheating.”
When in the midst of an ethically questionable (fraudulent) enterprise one must not cheat?
Michael
@adolphus:
In Option C, the “value” of these shit degrees from diploma mills should correlate more closely to the amount of tuition paid. in other words, their diplomae aren’t worth what these kids are paying.
Basically, the manager of the local McDonalds could probably moonlight and do what this instructor does – hand out some canned tests so that the students can collect a diploma and pretend that they’re educated.
John B.
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
Yeah, I caught that, too. First flag for me that this guy’s just as bad as the management people in the real world. Using doublespeak to fudge the fact that he isn’t really teaching. He’s just spoon-feeding pre-packaged “content” to bored kids.
How is using somebody else’s course materials year after year and collecting a paycheck not ethically questionable?
Duncan Watson
Cheating is endemic in US universities. It is fairly obvious when you are trying to hire the new college grads. So many are incompetent, you wouldn’t believe the softball questions that interviewees miss. I am glad this guy noticed the distribution and took action. I am not in any way surprised that this was a business course, but it could just as well had been most course studies.
I laugh at how some are calling the profs fat cats. Professors are often quite underpaid, many schools love to use “Associate” professors so they can keep the hours down. The money isn’t being skimmed by the professors. Universities are skimming the money elsewhere.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@WarMunchkin:
I disagree. You’re learning what, not how or why. What will disappear from your short-term memory before long unless you continue to access it regularly. How or why will stick with you longer, and that’s the point of any class, it seems to me.
WarMunchkin
@Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac: I think the argument that answer (A) goes with question (A) is exactly what detail about the number of candidate questions is meant to address. Have you ever tried memorizing a large volume of multiple choice questions? Sure, if you practice hard enough, you might remember some of them, especially the ones you got wrong on your first pass, but it’s far easier to group the questions into categories and use them to learn problem solving methods that you can later generalize to any similar question. I think the relevance of the number of questions is that it’s not likely that the “cheating” was a result of memorizing the answer to a particular question.
Marc
It’s pretty obvious that whatever the students did, it had a major impact on the grades (it added 1.5 grades to the average). So it’s pretty obvious that this is far from studying a set of practice questions – people don’t successfully memorize hundreds of answers to questions. So there must have been a much, much smaller set of question – in fact, I’d bet that they had the *actual test questions*, which hopefully even the apologists here might just be willing to admit is a tad too much.
So, no, this really isn’t the same as what you’re used to thinking of – you simply can’t get a distortion in the grades that large without basically having the questions and answers in advance.
Bill H.
@Michael:
@Crusty Dem:
He said “test bank,” not “test.” This is a set of questions provided by the text book publisher. There are many times more questions than will be on any one exam, and the instructor selects questions from the list to be included in each year’s exam. He will select different questions each year.
WyldPirate
@Southern Beale:
Hah. I got this covered.
This cheating scandal at UCF? It’s clearly Obama’s fault.
/snark off
ricky
@Peter:
I already put my top two in at 85 above, but just because you asked, I will restate them with a new addition of my own.
“The days of finding a new way to cheat the system are over.” Richard Quinn (channeling WWilson’s “War to End All War” for improbable hyperbole)
“If you have to give birth you’re going to have to give birth in the exam room….because its going to have to take a signed hand delivered note from God for you to get out from taking this mid term exam.” Richard Quinn ( not telling students who God must deliver the note to, thus negating this one avenue of excused absence.)
I could find more. My favorite theme is where he tells the culprits he has a 95% chance of proving their guilt, but if they turn themselves in he will forget all about it. “Just don’t ask me for any more favors, see!” I don’t have the exact quote, but if you strip search everyone and turn in all the keys I will tell you who ate the strawberries.
WarMunchkin
@adolphus: I can get behind that, this strikes me as a fair enough comment.
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): I think we differ as to what the purpose and use of those questions were, but I’m prepared to admit that I’m giving the students too much benefit of the doubt based on my own experience in studying for multiple choice tests by using multiple choice questions. I disagree with the idea that you necessarily don’t learn why and how from multiple-choice practices, but do agree that multiple-choice tests don’t usually do a good job of demonstrating the test-takers understanding of why and how.
MattR
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): I don’t necessarily disagree. But I would note that the fact that these students aced the test means that the professor was not very interested in testing if his students knew the how or the why.
John B.
@WyldPirate:
He was a college professor, wasn’t he? At a university that is sometimes abbreviated UC…
There’s no question that there’s a direct line. He probably used his muslim connections to get the test bank and provide it to his minions there, in exchange for their promise to commit voter fraud.
ricky
@WyldPirate:
I saw ya lifting that eye patch and cheating off me matey.
Arrrgghhh!
Nutella
@John B.:
And you know who else is a university professor? Bill Ayers, that’s who!
Dee Loralei
@Bill E Pilgrim: You win the thread sir!
thm
Two responses to the UCF cheating, from thoughtful academic bloggers:
Timothy Burke blogging at Easily Distracted
Historiann
The IMHO winning comment on Historiann’s blog was:
And interestingly, although there are 600 enrolled, only about 25 were there in person for the first lecture (linked from Historiann’s blog); the rest were watching online or at a satellite campus. This doesn’t absolve cheating in any way, but I think it does mean that the professor has to be a bit more careful with the precise words he chooses. In particular, in the first lecture he very clearly implies that he writes the questions. Starting at about the 16:30 mark, he says:
I do think the implicated students–or most of them at least–have a point. If you get ahold of the test bank questions–either because you think it’s a brilliant study strategy, or because you are trying to cheat, or because a classmate got them–I think it’s quite fair to think that these are just extra preparation for the exam and not what will be on the real exam, because your professor told you he’d write those.
Raenelle
I’m having trouble comprehending the comments defending the cheaters. Now THAT was totally unexpected. I didn’t think cheating was ethically ambiguous.
What made this video powerful for me was that the professor’s feelings were so authentic.
I’m actually quite inspired by his lack of cynicism, his commitment to teaching, his disappointment in the lazy-ass students who don’t understand the real value of a good education–what’s the saying? They know the cost of everything and the value of nothing.
Brachiator
Sadly, from a lot of the comments here, it doesn’t particularly matter that they were business students. Cheating for some is just another way of getting ahead.
@Michael:
You’ve obviously missed a lot of the research that shows how we (and our fellow higher primates) are not just social animals, but also that we regularly punish cheaters, and individuals who are not being fair, when we can identify them (Chimpanzees Prefer Fair Play To Reaping An Unjust Reward).
So, we are complex creatures. Yeah, we sometimes cheat, but we also recognize the negative consequences that can arise from letting cheaters get away with it.
The Dangerman
I scanned the first several dozen comments and I think something has been missed (and I’m far too lazy to read all the comments on this interesting thread):
It was a capstone course; that’s the last course prior to graduation. These idiots are lucky they haven’t all been failed and kicked out of school.
That said, it’s also clear the Professor is at fault for using a test bank for a capstone course; that’s just laziness. With 600 students and the metrics he had as his fingertips, it was a Scantron test; also, laziness. But, with 600, I can understand it.
Ain’t no good guys here except, perhaps, the Dean, who gave the perps an out for only a 4 hour ethics course. That’s an early gift for the Holidays.
ChrisS
I had a microbiology prof tell us that all of his tests were on file at the library, have at ’em. So we went and found hundred or so tests that stretched back 10+ years. Every one of them was formatted just the same, some had similar questions, but there were probably 500 short-form, multi-part essay questions.
He was also the professor that told us, when someone asked about grades being curved, that we should have stopped being As in kindergarten and there was no such thing as an A in a proper college class.
Hardest course I’ve ever taken in my life, but I’ll be damned if I don’t some microbiology to this day despite not really using it in day to day operations.
Dr. Morpheus
@WarMunchkin:
And you would have failed that question in statistics because the Central Limit theorem does not state that.
The Central Limit theorem states that as one’s sample size increase the distribution of errors becomes normally distributed.
It says nothing about the distribution of the actual population, or for that matter, of the sample that you are drawing.
It’s the error distribution that approaches a normal distribution, thus allowing for a number of statistical tests to determine if the sample characteristics (mean, variance, standard deviation, etc.) reflect the population statistical characteristics.
WyldPirate
@ricky:
This is a hoot.
The UCF football coach is George O’Leary. He was the head coach at Notre Dame for about three days before going to UCF.
He got fired by Notre Dame because–get this–he lied about having a BS degree.
That didn’t stop UCF from hiring him. It didn’t stop Notre Dame from hiring that old cheating sack of shit named Lou Holtz either. That old bastard landed every school he coached at since the early 70s in hot water with the NCAA–including Notre Dame.
MTiffany
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): In the same way that it’s the fault of public school teachers that their students can’t read, write, or perform basic arithmetic at grade level. ‘Cause you know, parents shouldn’t be held responsible for a goddamned thing, especially since their property taxes are too high, teachers are overpaid, and Obama is a socialist… they’re just trying to be their kid’s friend.
It’s all the fault of teachers and professors. Always. Shitty parenting is a liberal myth, like global warming, or evilution.
John B.
@rufflesinc:
I had one professor who would only give take-home exams, and give you three days to do them. He explicitly said that you could use absolutely any material that you wanted, including asking him or other professors for help.
Those were the hardest, most rewarding tests I’ve ever taken. Taught the crucial tradeoff between research & investigation versus critical analysis. No single resource had the answers, and you had to do serious work to figure out when you were against a brick wall and needed to return to research mode.
This was a math class, too.
Agoraphobic Kleptomaniac
Now that we’re over 200 comments, I’m just excited for DougJ’s “also, too” post and Kain’s commentary about how this relates to trash collection.
MTiffany
Awaiting moderation for properly spelled ‘soshulist.’ Ugh. FYWP.
Mnemosyne
@ricky:
Pretty much everything you’ve said in this thread has indicated that you think the professor is a jerk who deserved to have his students cheat on his test. Not much against, you know, the students who cheated on the test.
ETA: And here you are again justifying the cheating:
Dr. Morpheus
@dr. bloor:
Q: What year did Columbus set sail?
A: 1492
Have I “learned the material” or have I “learned the exam answers”?
If the questions were not some sort of math problems, essay type answer or something of that nature, but rather simple fact regurgitation type questions there is no difference between “learning the material” and “learning the exam answers”.
I remember all too well in a High School study group one of the girls saying, “Don’t try to understand the question, just memorize the answer” and no, we were not cheating with some copy of the test. We were working with example questions that the teacher had given the class beforehand.
My point here is that students “learn the exam answers” even without having stolen a copy of the test answer sheet and they do so because the tests merely require route memorization rather than actually thinking.
So yeah, as someone who actually has taught at a State University, count me in as another person who questions the accusation that the students cheated.
If they didn’t bring in some material or device with the answers but relied on their memory and the test was set up such that that was all that was needed to successfully answer the questions they didn’t cheat.
Otherwise what about classes where the professor hands out a list of exam questions some of which will be on the exam and others will not? Or even, and I’ve had this happen to me in one of my graduate classes, where the professor not only handed out a list from which the exam questions would be taken, but also provided the answers to those questions on the very same sheet. Was this professor complicit in cheating?
MattR
@thm: Unless there is further video mitigating that quote, the students would have had no expectation that the test bank questions would be appearing on the actual exam. As a result, I just don’t see how you can call it cheating. Theft perhaps for any students who were directly responsible in fraudulently obtaining the questions, but no way is that cheating.
Walker
@John B.:
And I guarantee that it was a math class of not larger than 30 students. Because it takes a long time to grade those types of tests/
Timmy Mac
Is it because I’m old or because I went to a shitty college that I didn’t even know that “test banking” was a thing?
Lori
@adolphus and @Michael
Community colleges generally have great student/teacher ratios, low tuition, and often have credits that roll over to their state universities. I think students would get a much better value by doing at least their first 2 years at community colleges, if they go for a university degree. I really wish I knew that before doing my undergrad degree – my student loans would be much smaller. Beyond that, whether or not a degree should be valuable, is an interesting discussion.
catclub
@robert green:
I suspect that Goldman Sachs has VERY few employees who are grads of … University of Central Florida!
Their employees at least get admitted to the Ivies – and cheat there.
Peter
@ricky: The first seems much more naive than douchey to me. In fact, I can’t see how that could even possibly be douchey.
As for the second, I also do not see the problem here. The students have a 51-hour window in which to perform their exam. That’s more than enough flexibility for any schedule. If his rhetoric is a little angry that’s probably because one in three of the faces staring back at him have lied to him. He has a right to be a bit upset.
And I really don’t think there’s anything unreasonable in saying that anybody who cheated on his midterm has forfeited the privilege of asking him for favors.
Mnemosyne
@Dr. Morpheus:
That is the strangest standard I’ve ever seen. If they memorized the stolen test questions ahead of time rather than physically bringing a piece of paper, it’s not cheating?
You really see no difference at all between a professor handing out sample questions and students breaking into a server to retrieve the test as long as the students working from the stolen test make sure to memorize the answers rather than bringing something with the answers into the room with them?
catclub
@Dr. Morpheus: ”
If they didn’t bring in some material or device with the answers but relied on their memory and the test was set up such that that was all that was needed to successfully answer the questions they didn’t cheat.”
I think if they did that, the distribution would not have been bimodal – they wrote down answers to a list of questions.
dr. bloor
@Dr. Morpheus:
As Adolphus pointed out at 175, if the students with the test banks learned the material, the distribution of grades in the makeup exam will look like that of the Fall 2010 class rather than the Summer 2010 class. Care to make a little side bet, say $100 to ActBlue, as to what the distribution looked like?
beergoggles
Moral of the story: Get caught breaking the rules and u can get away with barely a slap on the wrist.
With that kind of ‘punishment’, it’s no wonder they grow up to be Galtian overlords who don’t fear consequences.
WarMunchkin
@Dr. Morpheus: I suppose now might not be a good time to say that I didn’t take statistics? Explain it, if you have time? I’m trying to prove it backwards from the definition of cumulant and am finding it difficult, as its 5am in my area of the world.
Corner Stone
@adolphus:
By his own admission he’s punishing the 400+ who did not cheat.
dr. bloor
@Dr. Morpheus:
This is painfully obtuse. Professors gets to set the rules to the exam. If s/he wants to give out questions and the necessary information beforehand, then that’s square. Regardless of what you think of his methods, the professor in question here clearly did not. That’s cheating.
wasabi gasp
The silver lining is everybody gets a free lesson on socialized consequences.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Corner Stone: And I hope those 400 find out who the 200 are and take a chunk out of their asses for it.
MattR
@dr. bloor:
So what about when the professor has said that he writes his own exam questions. If you are given a set of sample questions from a text book company you would have no reason to think those questions would appear on the exam. Is that still cheating?
Chat Noir
@Timmy Mac: I had no idea about test banks either. I thought it was because I’m old and was in school 21+ years ago. However, I still believe I received a good education from my alma mater.
aimai
@John B.:
Well, but isn’t it even more a case of “caveat emptor” for the students? I mean if they wanted individualized, personal, fantastic teaching that meant something shouldn’t they have miraculously had the money and the priviliged background to get into an advanced seminar at Harvard? I agree that lousy teaching and a 600 person course is terrible–but the cost of running 30 separate, individualized courses with twenty students each is actually prohibitive.
I don’t know about B schools but professors in non b schools are paid very, very, little–the adjuncts almost nothing at all (like a couple of thousand a course). The anger expressed at the professor for “accepting lots of money” is totally misplaced–the money in higher ed is all going to the big corporations, the text book companies, and to nicer dorms for the students. Its really not going on high salaries for the actual professors and TAs.
aimai
Corner Stone
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): I wonder at what point the school owes those 400 students anything in return? Is enrolling in school a one way contract?
Dr. Morpheus
@Mnemosyne:
Yes, one involves theft, the other does not. No cheating is involved in either. Cheating means that the student does not rely on his or her own understanding of the material but rather uses some other device or person.
If the test merely requires you to regurgitate facts then the student who memorizes “1492” from the text book and the one who memorizes it from a test bank out of hundreds of other possible questions have both relied on their own personal memories. Neither student has cheated, one is guilty of theft.
It’s obvious that a lot of posters are confusing the issue of the crime of theft that some of the students in this video are guilty of and cheating.
dr. bloor
@MattR:
That’s an interesting question, although you’re suggesting a level of naivete among the students that I’m not buying–that is, someone has access to a study guide that is distributed to 200 students, and absolutely none of them even casually ask a lab instructor or the professor as to whether there’s any utility to that guide. And I’m guessing the first wiseass who tries that defense with Academic Affairs is going to get ripped a new one.
grendelkhan
Is it just a weird and wacky coincidence that this was posted around the same time that Making Light had a rather chilling post up about a fellow who makes his living writing custom grant proposals, term papers and other academic work for privileged semiliterate rich kids?
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): Are you familiar with the concept of guessing the teacher’s password?
ChrisS
@Lori:
That’s how I did it. When I left the military, my math and, to a smaller degree, writing skills left something to be desired. So I put in three full semesters and two summer sessions at a community college, took my 4.0 to a well-regarded specialty state school (that also had a private partner school) and graduated magna cum laude with a BS in hard science.
Without that community college for the basic stuff, which wasn’t a bad education either (my basic biology courses there were top-notch and led by a practicing veterinarian who brought in all sorts of bits & pieces), I don’t think I would have survived the sudden immersion in a high-level learning environment.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@MattR: Is that what happened in this case? No, at least not based on anything that’s been pointed out here. We’re talking about how this case is cheating, not some hypothetical, alternate-universe, your-college-experience case.
FreeAtLast
The strong bimodal nature of the grade distribution suggests to me that the 200 cheaters had more of an advantage than access to 750 questions from which 50 would be chosen. My husband had a case of a group of students getting the actual final exam ahead of time from a friend with a job in the printing room. I would suspect something like this to be the case here as well.
Mnemosyne
@MattR:
I think you could claim that if some of the students innocently received the questions thinking they were part of a study guide, then you could say that not all of the students cheated.
But you can’t claim that the entire scheme doesn’t qualify as cheating just because some of the participants didn’t realize that’s what it was. And, yes, I think they should face some kind of penalty (like, oh, 4 hours of an ethics class) so they won’t be that dumb again.
dr. bloor
@Dr. Morpheus:
I really, really hope my son never ends up in one of your classes.
MattR
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): Are you so sure? As quoted above by another commenter, in the first lecture the professor says:
That is not a bulletproof statement that he writes every question himself, but I don’t think it would be unreasonable for some of his students to come away with that belief.
Dr. Morpheus
@catclub:
The professor needs to have a refresher course in statistics because he’s talking out of his ass when he claims a bimodal distribution is some sort of ‘evidence’ of cheating.
His implicit assumption is that the students of his class are somehow random samples of the ‘universe’ of all college students otherwise he’s got no leg to stand on claiming that a normal distribution is to be expected, no scientific one that is. Remember the Central Limit Theorem states that it’s the distribution of errors that approaches a normal distribution as one randomly samples more and more of a population NOT the sample itself.
Frankly I think his little spiel on the bimodal distribution is trying to put the fear of God into the students. “You can’t escape the all seeing eye of statistics!” If he actually believes what he is saying then the students deserve a refund.
adolphus
@Corner Stone:
That’s a good point, but I am not sure what else he can do in this situation. The provost or dean or whoever he turns the evidence over to at 7:00 am on Sunday presumably has more resources and time to investigate. This is what that office does and I assume they can revoke degrees if they can prove someone has cheated even after they graduated. The professor needs to come up with some sort of solution before the semester progresses much further and it seems to me he has hit upon a good solution, though far from perfect. (I would prefer that he appended his deal with “And assuming you have a clean academic record you won’t get kicked out.” Repeat offenders should be held accountable whether they fess up or not)
At this point he cannot PROVE any specific student cheated and he runs the risk of expelling an honest student if he relies totally on the statistics. Given the choice of a 5% chance of getting erroneously expelled during my senior year or retaking a test, I’d stock up on number two pencils.
Not perfect, but I am willing to listen to other solutions.
John B.
@aimai:
And that’s the thing for me. My wife’s school is a great example: her department is housed in the education building, which is a ramshackle facility with many, many infrastructure problems. Directly across the street is the brand-new business school building, which is a massive, gleaming, architectural tour-de-force. It houses multiple eateries, e.g. Starbuck’s, McDonald’s, computer labs, conference rooms, and probably marble-tiled executive washrooms.
I’m not questioning the fact that students who are in a 600-person class are not going to get the kind of experience that I got in an Ivy-league classroom. I am questioning the competence and dedication of a professor who seems not to care.
B-school professors at her university get paid ridiculous amounts of money to train the next generation of doublespeakers. From what I understand, that’s a nationwide trend.
sukabi
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): and I think that is the prof’s real punishment… maybe the Dean didn’t see it as too big a deal, but the other students that have to drop everything and retake this test because 1/3 of their classmates couldn’t take it honestly will more than likely dish out some form of unpleasant payback themselves.
Alex S.
The professor was lazy, the students were lazy, it’s a lazy society.
Mnemosyne
@Dr. Morpheus:
So memorizing the stolen test that you received so you know which bubbles to fill out on the Scantron is not cheating because you’re relying on your memory when it comes to which bubble to fill in?
Again, that’s the weirdest definition I’ve ever seen.
FlipYrWhig
@Duncan Watson:
FYI, that’s not what “Associate Professor” means. An Associate Professor has been tenured and promoted after having his or her body of work evaluated by peers external and internal to his or her institution. An Associate Professor can be promoted once more to full Professor after showing continued scholarly productivity. A professor who teaches full-time and _can_ be tenured has the rank of “Assistant Professor.”
You’re probably thinking of “adjunct” rather than “associate.” An adjunct professor does a lot of work for little pay and is not on track to be tenured. Adjuncts get the short end of the stick in the academic world, and even the long sticks of the academic world are damn short by comparison.
MattR
@Mnemosyne:
But what if none of the students realized what was going on? What if they all actually thought they were receiving a study guide? Why should any of them pay a penalty for not doing anything wrong? (EDIT: What lesson are you teaching them? Don’t accept help from your peers?)
FlipYrWhig
@John B.: That’s because people who have been to business school make a lot of money, and the cycle feeds back on itself. (ETA: they’re well-off, so they give money back to their institution, making it well-off as well.) The buildings at the Wharton School at UPenn are _posh_.
sukabi
@Dr. Morpheus: if 1/3 of the students found the need to cheat to pass the test, then the chances that those students understand bimodal modeling and statistical analysis aren’t very high… I doubt that many of them will take the chance and call his bluff…
Lori
@ChrisS
Congratulations on your well-deserved honors. You really did things the smart way! Neat that you set your goals high and then figured out the way to attain them, even starting with some math and writing skills needing work.
I am impressed with the quality of teaching at community colleges. Without a need to spend their efforts on research and publishing, teachers at community colleges focus on teaching well.
Bobby Thomson
Pardon me, but since when is looking at old exams cheating? Some universities even keep the old exams in the library and anyone can look at them.
This asshat needs to stop blaming students for his own laziness.
Dr. Morpheus
@WarMunchkin:
O.K., first there are a couple of assumptions, one, that errors are IID, that is, there are independent, and identically distributed. Second, that every member of the population in question has a chance of being drawn in a sample.
This is my argument against his ridiculous claim that the grades must always look normally distributed. There’s no way in hell he can claim that every college student in the US had an equal probability of showing up for the Fall 2010 class.
See the proof section of the Wikipedia entry, it’s a good, concise explanation if you are interested in the actually mathematical reasons.
Bobby Thomson
@Michael:
This.
Mnemosyne
@MattR:
So they accidentally and innocently broke into the textbook publisher’s server and just happened to send the right test out to all of their classmates?
If you can construct a “cheating” scenario where none of the participants were aware that it was cheating, be my guest, but it very clearly has no resemblance to what happened here. If nothing else, one of the students who took the test should have spoken up and told his TA or the professor that this looked an awful lot like a “study guide” that his classmate had e-mailed.
dr. bloor
@Bobby Thomson:
And you should read the thread about the nature and source of the test bank questions.
Mnemosyne
@Bobby Thomson:
Since someone broke into the textbook publisher’s database to do it, which is what the professor is claiming happened (hence the talk about the publisher’s legal department possibly taking action).
Dr. Morpheus
@dr. bloor:
IF he does I really, really hope he understands the difference between cheating, theft, and receiving stolen goods.
The latter two crimes occurred in this class, the former did not.
I am not arguing that nothing wrong occurred here. I am arguing that cheating did not occur here
slag
@Dave:
What do you have against chimps? Do you not think that they have systems of rules and ethics?
Most Chimps > Most Business Students
dr. bloor
@Dr. Morpheus:
Don’t worry. He’s twelve, and his ethical compass and capacity for logical thinking already surpass yours.
So, “material” v. “test questions.” Are we on for that $100 bet I suggested above about the distribution of grades on the make-up?
celticdragonchick
@Brick Oven Bill:
True high quality trolling. Subversive and satirical with numerous “teabagging” riffs to let us know that this (almost) certainly is a joke.
A 9.6 out of 10.
Marc
Goddamn it, but you don’t change the mean on a test by a grade and a half by letting people look at advance copies of sample test questions.
You change the goddamn mean that much if people memorize the answers to the *actual test*.
Christ, this pisses me off as much as liberals trying to excuse intrusive TSA groping because the conservatives complaining about it have political motives. Some crap is just wrong, and there are no excuses for it. Cheating and groping count as such in my book.
Bobby Thomson
@Comrade Jake:
It’s not like they broke into his office and stole the test, or bribed a TA for the questions. I would consider that cheating.
I don’t consider it cheating to look at old tests. In fact, in some disciplines it’s expected, even mandatory. If the prof isn’t industrious enough to -write new questions- ask his TAs to write new questions, then, no, this doesn’t seem like something worthy of outrage.
Comrade Jake
As a faculty member, I find the notion that the students simply stole here and didn’t cheat, to be complete and utter bullshit. And I write that as someone who assembles brand new exams every semester.
FlipYrWhig
When I give exams, I use essay questions. It’s not that hard to generate one or two new essay questions every semester, and then if somewhere there’s an archive of all the questions I’ve asked previously, well, so be it: trying to “memorize” an essay answer is pretty close to just plain studying. A well-designed exam isn’t IMHO supposed to be tricking the test-takers anyway: the questions should be things we spent time on, and a better answer is more complete rather than “right” as opposed to “wrong.”
But maybe in the humanities things are just different. I would _never_ give a multiple-choice or true-false kind of exam.
WarMunchkin
@Mnemosyne: I don’t really see how you jump from test bank to knowing the specific test questions beforehand. A test bank is a collection of a large amount of questions. I don’t agree that it translates to “knowing which bubbles to fill out”. Knowing which bubbles to fill out means knowing which of the questions were chosen for the test, which isn’t the stated scenario.
I think your fallback had been that because someone (at some time, somewhere) acquired the test bank, which was copyrighted content, (though I don’t agree with the hacking theory, this stuff is torrentable easily), that = cheating, because it wasn’t freely distributed. I don’t agree with that argument either.
To be honest, I don’t think it’s possible to completely judge what happened just based on the video. This thread is a litterbox of cognitive bias, but heeey, it’s the internet…
Marc
Explain to me how the average grade in a class of 600 goes from a C to an A- if they look over a long list of sample questions and nothing else. They clearly had the key telling them *which questions* from the bank were going to be asked.
Then, and only then, will these excuses for blatant cheating be worth a bucket of spit.
MattR
@Mnemosyne:
It seems that you are making a lot of assumptions about what did and did not happen. As far as I know, nobody got the “right test” to send out. They got a list of all the prep questions that the text book company provides to students. I have no idea how, and it is very likely that it was shady. But even outright theft of those questions does not make this cheating if the students had no reason to think that the questions they stole were the same ones that would be on the exam. As for your last point, neither of us have any idea if any students did mention this to the prof or a TA. For all we know, that is how this all came to the prof’s attention in the first place.
@Marc:
Easy. Those sample questions turn out to be on the actual exam.
sukabi
After reading this thread, I’m beginning to understand why this country is in the mess it’s in… the basic concept of what constitutes cheating has been dissected and mauled into something that is unrecognizable to to those folks who would actually follow ethical standards and NOT CHEAT. To everyone else cheating has become “obstacles to overcome”, “advanced research”, “win at any cost”, and “the cost of doing business”, all the way down to the most used excuse in the country today “If he (professor, client, ect) wasn’t so (lazy, fat, incompetent, ect) I wouldn’t have had to resort to this (which in a normal world would be considered cheating).”
Bobby Thomson
@dr. bloor:
Hmm. OK, this is somewhat different than just looking at old tests, but it’s still terribly lazy of the professor to use a test provided by a textbook publisher.
Comrade Jake
@Bobby Thomson:
They acquired something from the publisher that only instructors are supposed to have. It’s really not all that different from breaking into the professor’s office.
As for old exams, I provide my students with copies and so there aren’t any problems. But if I didn’t do that, and students tried to track them down without asking me, that’s questionable behavior. You’re making the assumption that if the instructor doesn’t explicitly state something is against the rules, then it must be kosher. That’s the slippery slope.
Marc
@WarMunchkin:
You get there, as people are repeatedly missing the point, from the fact that a third of the people got almost perfect scores on the test. You simply can’t get that sort of impact from memorizing a long list of questions and answers.
You get that impact if you know exactly which questions are on the test and what their answers are. Kids just aren’t that good at memorizing hundreds of answers.
Mnemosyne
@WarMunchkin:
Because, as Marc said above, you don’t get a sudden shift of a grade and a half just because people studied a huge list of questions, some of which were on the exam. You get it because some people knew exactly which questions would be on the exam.
geg6
All I can say about this is, based on the people here who seem to have no problem with cheating and those who think college is some sort of joke and just some sort of money-making scheme on the part of the institutions and faculty/staff, I’m beginning to think I’ve stumbled onto a Teabagger or some sort of fringey libertarian Reason-is-too-full-of-intelligence-and-human-empathy site.
dr. bloor
@dr. bloor:
No disagreement there. The only argument I can generate in the prof’s defense is that the publisher’s test questions had been vetted re: degree of difficulty, and thus using them would yield a fairer exam (on a term-by-term basis) than the prof was likely to construct on his own. It isn’t clear that that’s the case, though.
dr. bloor
@Bobby Thomson:
No disagreement there. The only argument I can generate in the prof’s defense is that the publisher’s test questions had been vetted re: degree of difficulty, and thus using them would yield a fairer exam (on a term-by-term basis) than the prof was likely to construct on his own. It isn’t clear that that’s the case, though
John B.
@geg6: I want to be clear about one thing here: although I am attacking the professor, I am also very sure that the students cheated. No doubt in my mind.
And deserve to be punished more harshly than a four-hour ethics seminar.
Michael
@Dr. Morpheus:
I’m wondering if he wrote all the manuals they use for rating modeling at Moody’s, S&P, and all the big credit bureaus….
WarMunchkin
@Marc: I don’t actually think it’s necessary to actually memorize the questions though. I don’t presume to know what exactly what was on the test (lol, irony of this thread), but, for example, if the subject was quantitative, all you really need to do is learn how to do a few of the questions, and then you can do anything like them.
But you know what, I’m just seeing a lot of filling in blanks to construct the narrative here, and I’m guilty of it too, so. yeah.
For whatever its worth, in the standalone scenario of having an unreasonably large number of questions where a small subset will be on an exam, I don’t think it’s cheating. You can’t memorize every question, you have to learn the content that they address. But I guess this isn’t the scenario other people have in mind.
MattR
@Mnemosyne:
It’s hard to say for sure without knowing the details of the grade distribution. If the prof is using the standard numeric values for the letter grades that would mean the average went from about a 75 to a 91. If you assume that the other 400 students scored the same as every previous test, that means that the 200 students who cheated would have to have improved their scores by an average of 48 points which is highly doubtful (even if every one of those 200 students got a perfect score)
Matt
Wow! People hate professors–especially when those other people are professors. This guy is teaching 600 students (which ought be be a crime but that’s on his institution, not on him) and he decides to use a publisher’s calibrated test bank and somehow it’s his fault that some students hacked or bought the material off the publisher and brazenly distributed it and BRAGGED about it? The guy may have cut a few corners but he’s teaching 600 students at a place where the students don’t even show up (probably don’t have a room that large).
This is larcerny, conspiracy and fraud–precisely the shit that got our economy destroyed. He’s incredibly reasonable by letting them off with 4 hours of community service and he’s the asshole?
I would have (and have in a similar situation–not test bank, stolen test) flunk the lot.
I’m beginning to think those hammering him are just self-righteous jerks who want to feel superior or are justifying their own history of, shall we say, ethical challenges.
Bob Loblaw
This thread reminds me to invest more overseas…
Corner Stone
@sukabi:
Like what?
Corner Stone
@Matt:
Why?
ETA what was your justification?
Steve
So one-third of the class just innocently got their hands on what they thought was a long list of sample questions, and studied them diligently, only to discover to their surprise on exam day that they had been given a list of the actual exam question? That’s seriously the story you guys want to go with?
Corner Stone
@Bob Loblaw: Because there’s less cheating? Or they are less hypocritical about it?
Matt
@Corner Stone
The lot who cheated. Bad phrasing.
Michael
@geg6:
Mine was – it was just an entrance ticket for the most part. Some classes were interesting, but most were a genuine waste of time for somebody like me, who has always done a lot of outside reading.
Of course, I entered public college after the glory days of the baby boom, so there was nothing magical or wonderful about it – the money and focus wasn’t there.
Others’ mileage may vary. My attitude is solidly rooted in Gen Jones/GenX cynicism, as we got none of the good deals (except for the pot – yeah, there was a lot of ditch weed floating around, but some of the nicer stuff was starting to circulate by then).
Peter J
That was some harsh punishment for the ones who cheated…
Possibilities…
1. The university decided that because of the sheer number of cheaters they didn’t want to do anything harsher. Maybe it’s more about getting the money than educating students? Lesson to learn, cheat in numbers?
2. The university felt that they didn’t have enough evidence to actually punish students, so instead they try to get the cheaters to admit guilt. Or they feel that if they administered some harsher punishment, the cheaters would then be able to sue and win?
Comrade Jake
@Steve:
The fact that people think that story is even remotely plausible just blows my mind.
Michael
@Matt:
Pretty much. In terms of providing value for the dollar, professors haven’t exactly been setting the world on fire for their customers for about the past 30 years or so.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Matt: My perception of this thread is that it’s the professors (or prof types like me) who are calling this cheating. Don’t get me wrong–I have great disdain for this method of education and I was the one who pointed out that this prof didn’t call himself a teacher, but rather as someone who provided course content–but I’ve been pretty clear throughout that it’s the students who are well in the wrong here.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Michael: Students aren’t customers. They’re not buying anything from me other than the opportunity to learn, and if they don’t take advantage of the opportunity, then it’s their loss.
Michael
@Peter J:
Dead lock winner.
Dean: “You cheated on the test, and scored better than you should have, therefore, you’re expelled”.
Student: “Prove it.”
Hatfield
Our nation’s political and financial systems are clearly run by gangsters. The only crime that was committed was the idiots were caught. Our future leaders have learned a great lesson here. Higher Ed indeed!
Anonymous37
Anyone else reminded of this story? A UC Berkeley prof had his laptop stolen, then told his class that he had managed to get information that allowed him to definitively identify the thief, and that he had maybe an hour before the prof was going to notify the authorities.
But of course, he was bluffing. And the thief knew it, because the laptop was never returned.
It’s funny, though: if there was ever a professor who deserved to have his laptop stolen, it would be this guy, who had various issues with ethics, going so far as to scuttle another professor’s bid for tenure because he had the temerity to question Rine’s ties to Novartis.
MattR
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
Of course students are customers for the exact reason you mention. They are buying the opportunity to learn from a series of professors and the quality of those professors determines if they are getting a good deal on their purchase.
WyldPirate
@geg6:
To some extent, and to a lot of the students and at many institutions, this is true.
A load of students are admitted to colleges and universities that have no business being at a college or university. Standards and requirements have gotten exceedingly lax at many universities and there has been a push to retain and graduate students who should be eliminated. There is such an overemphasis on providing amenities, “on-line degree programs” (the worst thing to ever hit higher education IMO) and other tripe that the product being produced is a shadow of what it once was.
At some point you have to ask yourself why the decrease in standards and the focus on increasing enrollment and retention. Don’t kid yourself. Those FTEs mean more funds, more administrator jobs and more economic impact for the towns in which the schools reside.
Ron
I guess I’m missing something. How is having a bank of old test questions out there “cheating”? It would be one thing if someone broke in and stole the actual exam, but I fail to see how it’s cheating if they just used resources legitimately available to them.
Michael
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
How are they not? They are providing you money for a service. What you’ve provided them isn’t translating to dollar for dollar gains on the job market, nor is it even showing demonstrable opportunity for them to work their way up into gains.
Like it or not, college professorship has now entered into its second generation of a negative relationship with the student bodies that have passed through. They’re not seeing the gains for it – ironically, this at a time when academia appears to be paying far greater than it has at any time in the past.
I’ve seen some language lately that is talking about a bubble aspect to American higher education, and I think they may be right. Why should a kid take on a flaming shitpile of debt for a liberal arts degree just so they can hibernate in shit jobs for 10 years after college, nursing along student loan debts that they’re not allowed to bankrupt? What possible love and adoration do you think they’re going to have for that beloved college experience, particularly when they’re dealing with 600 member webinars from a content provider that grades based on canned tests?
Marc
Watch the start of the video and look at the distributions of grades in the two classes: the one where people knew the answers to the test questions and the ones where they didn’t.
If you can look at that evidence, and his verbal indication that the class average went up by 1.5 grades = 15 points (which is what the graphs showed)…well, that’s not some innocent little thing that the students were working with. They knew the answers, and they knew them well enough to get almost perfect scores.
And, yes, as a professor I’m really pissed at the excuse-making going on here. I wouldn’t teach a class that size and detest the underlying model of education being used, but that doesn’t remotely excuse what the kids did here.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@MattR: That’s not the way it’s argued though, not by hardly anyone. When a student says to me that they’re a customer, they’re saying it in a tone which suggests they’re buying a product, i.e. a diploma, which is supposed to represent an education. They’re not, because you can no more buy an education than you can buy freedom or liberty or any other abstraction. The only thing they can actually buy is opportunity–but they (and most of the people who argue for the consumer-model of education) don’t see it that way. And what’s more, they complain about how much it costs, when the truth is they’re never bearing the full cost of that opportunity, especially if they’re attending a state school.
priscianus jr
@Michael: Sounds like what you’re saying is, “Hey, I’m paying plenty, I deserve a fuckin’ degree.” It is difficult for me to express suficient contempt for your comment. And if you want to blame somebody or the oversized tuition, guess what? it’s not the professor’s fault,
geg6
@Michael:
Hmmm. Guess you picked badly then. I, too, am GenJones and found my public university education to be top notch. Not to mention that the public university for which I now work was just named as the top university in the nation for producing the most-prepared hires, according to a WSJ nationwide poll of employers (and the Ivies were significantly lower on the list).
It’s been my experience, after over 20 years in post-secondary education, that it is more likely to be a private college or university that operates through similar-to-businesses profit motives. But that’s just my experience.
Matt
I’m again appalled at the tone that Colleges are some sort of Club Med. I’ve been in this gig for 20 years and every year the students work harder, are more welcome to being challenged, are more articulate and from more diverse backgrounds. Often they are smarter, in a raw sense, than I am.
Maybe there’s some kids partying (aren’t there always) but trust me, undergrads in the Great Recession are very interested in getting value for their dollar.
But I guess it’s more fun to yell “Profs suck!” and “Hey, you kids, get off my lawn!”
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Michael:
If you take your car to a mechanic and said mechanic fails to fix what he said was the problem, then you can rightfully say the mechanic failed in his duty to you. If you come to my class and can’t write an essay when you’re done, you can’t necessarily say the same thing about me, because there are other factors at play, not the least of which is that you may very well be an idiot unable to grasp the basic concepts of the course you’re signed up for. I have not failed in my duty to you–you have failed to take advantage of the opportunity presented to you. That’s the difference.
MattR
@Marc: A 15 point increase based on 1/3 of the class cheating means that the average cheater gained 45 points. That is nearly impossible. Much more likely is that the majority of the class had access to the “cheat sheet” and gained a handful of points from it even though they did not fully utilize it like some in the class did.
balki
As others have pointed out, there’s a lot of narrative-filling going on on both sides of this debate. There are numerous articles about the scandal available with a Google search, but details are still pretty scarce.
According to an article in the Orlando Sentinel yesterday, the test banks were available for sale online, and they suggest that one student may have bought the test bank and shared it with others. So those claiming that somebody hacked Pearson’s servers may be right, but they may not be. There has been no mention in any article I’ve read that hacking was involved, so many of you are clearly making huge leaps not supported by evidence.
The article further states that the midterm was given over multiple days, and UCF’s computer system generated 55 new questions (out of the 700 in the bank) for each day. So the suggestion that everybody just studied the answers to their specific exam seems highly unlikely as well.
Nobody is claiming that “cheating” is acceptable. To those suggesting that anyone defending the students is a Tea Bagger or Wall Street supporter (geg6), I would counter that viewing the world from a black and white viewpoint is a hallmark of conservatism. I think we can all agree that there were mistakes in judgment made, but until we get more facts it’s a bit premature to label this as “cheating”.
Ron
I guess there is a concern about hacking into a publisher’s test bank, but I guess I would never use test questions coming from a publisher’s test bank of questions. Granted I almost never use multiple choice questions (except in some limited situations) but I still think it’s just a bad idea. At first I thought the objection was to using a bank of old tests being kept by someone. As far as I’m concerned, that’s not cheating at all.
2liberal
@Michael:
this is not test banking in the sense of students looking at previous exams.
this is a list of test questions created by a textbook publisher, with answers, for use by teachers. This was stolen and sold to students. This is cheating.
i don’t think it is very bright of you to mix up what is a very obvious difference.
geg6
@priscianus jr:
That’s what it sounds like to me, too. Kinda like what so many students do who end up in my office after losing their student aid due to unsatisfactory academic progress. Quite ironic when, in fact, most of them have significant amounts of grants and scholarships, meaning they didn’t really pay for most of it anyway.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@priscianus jr: Which is what you often get from those online colleges that advertise during the Jerry Springer show. And you get what you pay for, which is a pretty much useless degree.
And I’ll certainly admit that I’m bothered by the extent to which universities are following that model. The class that started this whole thread is an example of it, I think–it’s a poor educational model, and I think the students who feel ill-served by it have every reason to feel that way.
MattR
@2liberal:
You have a link for this?
priscianus jr
@Dave:
geg6
@balki:
Well, since I never actually said this, I guess we’ll chalk this up to a “mistake in judgment,” too.
adolphus
@Matt:
Except when they make radios out of coconuts to get everyone off of an uncharted desert island. Then suddenly everyone wants to be his friend.
balki
@geg6:
Did I misread your comment at 270?
geg6
@adolphus:
FTW!
Ron
@Michael: They are providing money for a service. That service is not to give them monetary gains. The service is getting an education. I kind of have to laugh at the implied idea that faculty are overpaid. Most faculty (especially in technical fields) could easily earn far more by working in industry. I teach because I love doing what I do. Obviously I want to get paid for it, but I could easily have taken a slightly different career path and earned far more than I’m earning now.
geg6
@balki:
Yes. Yes, you did.
Or perhaps more accurately, you read into it something I never said.
Comrade Jake
@balki:
And how is that not cheating? Again, the only people who are supposed to have the bank are instructors.
Incidentally, we have seen the same thing with solution manuals to textbooks. Students can acquire them for just about any textbook online, illegally. It’s just like downloading a music file.
So let’s suppose a student in a class gets a hold of one of these solution manuals online, and uses them to complete the homework sets. Would anyone here view that as anything other than cheating?
Michael
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
But if the opportunity they’re buying hasn’t been a productive one going into its second generation and the experience while they’re obtaining that opportunity is neither enlightening nor enjoyable, then how much love of college as an institution is going to survive into a third generation? From my standpoint, I already saw college as a necessary evil and step, not something to be cherished as an ideal.
And as to the cost of a state school not being fully borne by a student, sadly, you’re right. The product for most of us out here sucks ass and won’t be returning on the dollar, which is why those who consume the product complain about the quality and the cost.
Matt
@Ron: Yeah, the overpaid professor shtick is pretty funny for a guy who has taught 800 students in the last six months. So what’s his salary work out to per student credit hour? And I’ve always noted among my colleagues that the overpaid ones love to sign up for summer school!
priscianus jr
@BGinCHI:
numbskull
Too lazy to read ~300 posts, but a search on “collective” returns nothing, so there’s a chance that the following will be original and add to the discussion:
The cheaters cheated. In the big scheme of things, this isn’t the worst kind of cheating, but still, they cheated. They should not profit from the cheating. However, 400 students did NOT cheat. They should not be punished. Period. Full Stop.
IF the prof and admin can figure a way to punish the cheaters, then fine. The prof CLAIMS that in a very short time, he and the admin will KNOW the identities of all the cheaters. If that is the case, then why are the prof and admin COLLECTIVELY PUNISHING the class? They KNOW 400 students are innocent. Hell, if I was one of those students, I would NOT take the new mid-term but I would threaten to sue the admin if they tried to punish me for something that they themselves admit that I did not do.
I underwent a very similar scenario when I was an undergrad. It was my first lesson in what bullies some in academic administration are (though many are not). And true to form, as soon as I threatened suit, they backed way, way down. Magically it all became rather unimportant to them.
I think the reality is that the prof is full of shit. He has a very good idea of who did what, who cheated and who played by the rules, but he can’t be 100% sure. So what does he do? He punishes everyone. He’s a dick.
Further, if the prof and admin absolutely KNOW who cheated, then why are they offering ANYTHING at all? Why ANY clemency? How is THAT ethical? How does THAT restore the reputation of the school? How is that FAIR?
The fact that they’re negotiating is a tell. They ARE NOT in the position the prof states that they are, otherwise they’d simply haul each (known) cheater in front of the ethics council (or similar) and pull the trigger. The fact that they aren’t doing that tells us that the admin is not sure of its cases on an individual level.
Adam C
As a prof, I would never excuse cheating but you’ll have to convince me that it occurred. A lot of assumptions and presumptions are flying like mad in this thread.
What we know: (1) a test bank exists; (2) there is evidence that a large number of students had access to it; and (3) the mean test score was inordinately high.
Marc assumes that the students had the test, not a test bank, in order to justify (3). That would be cheating. I see no evidence for this – the stack of papers the professor was waving around (“some of you will recognize this”) was far, far too thick to represent a test.
Many assume that the students (or at the very least, one of them) stole the test bank. This would also be cheating, IMHO. But we have no evidence of that either, other than vague, threatening words from the professor about what the publisher might do. If this bank was legitimately available to a large segment of the population, then I don’t see how it’s cheating.
Many believe the grade shift, and perhaps the “bimodal” distribution, are evidence that cheating must have occurred. There are several possible explanations for this. Here’s my favourite: part of the historical difficulty of the test was surprise. The test bank includes material that students don’t expect because in class that material was given a low priority. Those with the test bank can quickly see that it’s going to be tested, and so they study that material.
Many people also assume that the professor isn’t talking out of his ass when he claims to be using forensic statistics to determine who cheated and who didn’t. Honestly, if this is a multiple choice test I don’t see how in the world that’s possible.
Which leads to more bluster, that people also seem to believe, that he’s willing to offer a deal to those who “confess”. Tom Sawyer would have been proud of that one, it’s got to be the oldest trick in the book. At this point I’m not even sure I believe him when he says he’s got the provost involved.
I understand why the professor is upset. Writing tests is hard work, and now he’s got to spend a lot more time on it than he hoped for. I agree with Dr. Morpheus and Ricky, though, that just because he’s bullying and self-righteous it doesn’t mean he’s right.
Corner Stone
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
Of course they are customers. What do you think a college is? It’s a service provider.
IMO we need to drastically revamp how colleges/universities operate. The time where a curriculum included 30 mandatory hours of something not even remotely relevant to your studies is over. That’s now just a gimmick to milk more cash from the system and the students.
Well rounded citizens are not being produced out of most of these factories, just long term debtors.
Innocent Bystander
Interesting video clip and responses to the central question, did the students cheat or not? I’m of the opinion that if these questions were culled from a master database of possible questions, then the results could be interpreted that-
(1) this particular group of students did a better job of learning the bank.
(2) more students are availing themselves of these study tools because we all know the real message here is that learning is secondary to getting good grades. I know my parents were always harping on getting grades…never a lot of emphasis on learning.
(3) since the professor’s problem is one of magnitude (ie the number of students that might have had an advantage), is it practical in today’s internet age that this kind of information acquisition can even be thwarted?
The last test I took was my pilot’s knowledge test last year (my 1st test in 35 years). Interestingly, that test is developed from a database of, I think , 1200 total questions. My FI encouraged me to take the AOPA version of the test as many times as I had time available. The online test is randomly generated each time from this database. It was a great learning tool and seems like a good way to absorb the information.
I’m curious about the statistical analysis, though. Had this been the only clue, would it have been a legitimate one? I know in manufacturing widgets, a bi-nominal distribution is a flag that your process is out of control, but does that really extend to discrete human testing results? I suppose this professor could plot these distributions for all other past test results…but would that still be grounds for suspecting rampart cheating or just an anomaly? Had the results been skewed towards poorer grades, that wouldn’t signify cheating, right?
priscianus jr
@Marc:
Marc
@MattR:
You don’t get a double-peaked distribution that way. The cheaters were simply taking a different test than the rest of the class was. Your logic is basically OK, and it indicates that more than a third of the class cheated (because the math basically requires a cheater fraction of about 1/2).
By question bank, I suspect that they had some automated program to give students 30 out of 50 questions off some list, or the equivalent. So if they memorized 50 answers they were guaranteed 100%; since that’s a lot to memorize, some folks only got a partial edge.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Michael: The opportunity they’re buying is only as valuable as they make it. I cannot emphasize that enough. No professor in the world is going to make a student who doesn’t give a fuck into a success. It’s on the student, and it always has been. You can get an education that rivals an Ivy League education at almost any state school if you put enough effort into it, and you can walk out of an Ivy League school a confirmed dumbass if all you want to do is get by. It’s all up to the student.
balki
@geg6:
You said that you feel like you’ve stumbled across a Tea Bagger website because people are justifying cheating. Did you not?
@Comrade Jake:
I’m not arguing that it was right to use the test bank or that whomever they may have bought it from acquired it legally. But again, the prof stated that he writes his own questions. These students should have had no reason to expect them to be on the test. I’m not going to say that it was right of them to use it as study material, but based on the randomized test questions, they still would have had to study (or memorize) all 700 of the questions. I simply fail to see how this is different from studying prior tests. If studying prior tests is against the rules at UCF, then fine, but it was certainly encouraged when I was in school. Again, I’m just saying that this is not black-and-white. We don’t yet know enough to pass judgment on anyone involved.
Vlad
This is no more cheating than counting cards in blackjack is cheating. The casino doesn’t like it – but that doesn’t mean you’re doing anything wrong.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Corner Stone:
That’s a faulty metaphor, because a service provider generally guarantees you’ll get something in return. A college doesn’t. It only offers you the chance to get something in return. We don’t make guarantees.
Michael
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
Ah – now I see the problem. You are of the belief that most students come to you with empty heads in the need of knowledge for the sake of knowledge.
That is a touching Renaissance concept. Unfortunately, for the vast majority of us flyover unwashed, we were forced to go to college as a qualification to enter the workforce, whether the course of instruction was relevant or not. As a result of that, the content providers have bubbled themselves into requiring greater and greater pay over the years, the private student loan industry thrived, the ability to bankrupt student loans disappeared, and people destined to $28,000 drone jobs shuffling paper in a dingy cubicle found themselves with student loan totals that would choke a maggot.
After all that, they’re not going to think fondly of their professors, nor are they going to be enthusiastic about their children burning up whatever meager funds are available to go to college. If they are going to attend 600 student capstone webinars, they may as well do it at Phoenix Onl!ne for a little bit of savings.
@Ron
See my above. University educations at state schools are going to go the way of the buggy whip, given the level of care taken.
Steve
@numbskull:
The entire class needs to retake the exam because the integrity of the exam was compromised. Good luck with that lawsuit, I’m sure your constitutional right not to have to retake an exam will be recognized any day now.
priscianus jr
@Corner Stone:
Mnemosyne
@MattR:
It’s so strange to me that you keep looking at plausible evidence of cheating (students improving their scores by 45 points) and insisting that it somehow proves that it wasn’t cheating because it’s so improbable that they would be able to have that kind of improvement through cheating.
I would argue it’s implausible for that many students to have that kind of improvement solely through studying harder, but very easy for them to do it through cheating.
ricky
@WyldPirate:
O’Leary did you say? That’s a good name for the Fighting Irish. Or NBC News.
Michael
@Brian S (formerly Incertus):
How enthused are the irritated parents of Generation Three going to be, given that lack of a “guarantee”?
Michael
@priscianus jr:
Wonder how academic salaries are going to fare once so many people opt to go to online college instead?
grendelkhan
@Dr. Morpheus: It’s certainly very strong evidence that the class grades had been pulling from a relatively homogeneous population, score-wise, for the summer semester (and presumably before that), and yet seemed to be pulling from two different populations, one with a significantly higher mean than the other, for the fall semester. Now this means that a significant portion of the fall students were sharply differentiated from the rest by something. Either the higher-scoring population just worked legitimately harder–in a way that sharply divided them from the non-harder-working population–or the higher-scoring population had or did something that the previous semesters didn’t.
It’s not damning evidence of cheating, but it’s damning evidence that something was going on.
Ron
@Corner Stone: With all due respect, you appear to not have the faintest clue what you are talking about. College education is not and should not be a “job preparation”. This may be crazy, but I think it’s valuable that people learn something about the world and how to think as well as to be marketable in the job market. If you want to just get a job, go enroll in one of the for-profit degree factories.
Ron
@Michael: Who do you think will teach these online courses? I understand the move to online teaching and frankly I think it’s a complete disaster. I spend a lot of time outside the classroom working with my students one on one. How is that going to work in the age of online courses?
Marc
A good article on the subject at
http://www.palmbeachpost.com/news/ucf-probes-cheating-scandal-involving-hundreds-of-business-1034013.html
Bottom line: they say that the exam key was stolen. A handful of people getting an edge on a few questions doesn’t change the class average; they really are amazingly stable.
Whether you could garner statistical evidence of cheating reliably depends a lot on how the tests were taken. They may, for example, have had a subset of questions drawn from a different list that wasn’t public.
The fact that 200+ students confessed doesn’t make the innocence excuse look all that great either. The complaints that they didn’t know that they were looking at the actual test are…unconvincing.
Another source,
http://uwire.com/2010/11/19/cheating-scandal-at-ucf-hits-youtube-fallout-still-unclear/
also makes it pretty clear that the actual test, not a long list of questions, was distributed.
The length of the document was probably related to the statistics of how the questions got answered. You can generate quite a few pages via that method.
ricky
@Bob Loblaw:
Earlier without any authority whatsoever, someone declared another comment “the winner.” Given that it would be unethical for me to declare another winner, but in light of your suggested action, allow me to offer you a nice tax break instead.
wengler
From reading many of these comments it appears that the only thing that can be agreed upon is that capitalist-designed education systems appear to have very poor returns.
Michael
@Ron:
It’ll be awesome up there at the Ivy League, but there might not be very many academic jobs to go around.
The high level competition will be glorious!
Ron
@Michael: What guarantee do you want? Success comes from a variety of factors. Sure, one is the ability of the faculty to prepare the students, but much more is how much they are willing to do to prepare themselves. And frankly, some of it is ability. Not everyone has equal ability.
Corner Stone
@priscianus jr: They damn sure are customers.
That little trick about University Authority always being right, or even the Last Word went out of style 20+ years ago.
I was an older student as I finished my BS and I guarantee you the Profs did not get over on me the way they did the younger students who didn’t know any better. I had more than one after hours discussion with Profs and their division head if needed when I felt I was being treated unfairly or not receiving my money’s worth. Because by that time I was in loan debt and paying the load myself. You can be god damned sure I worked my ass of to get my money’s worth. And any asshole Prof who wasn’t putting in the same effort got to hear about it.
And IMO, the education part is exactly what you make of it, i will agree with others on this. But a degree is now part of the check box feature when applying for jobs in this society. If you have it they check it off and that lets you get a chance to talk further with them about employment.
That’s it. That is what a degree is in today’s society.
Ron
@Michael: I have no clue what your “Ivy league” comment was about. I teach at a small liberal arts college that is nowhere near Ivy League status. But we do care about a complete education.
Corner Stone
And yeah, I had my share of great instructors as well as some not great ones. I worked twice as hard in the classes the Prof was an out and out asshole, to earn every bit of my high grade and provide more foundation that any criticism I had of their performance was not sour grapes or bitter whining.
Corner Stone
And further, IMO Prof Quinn is a pompous jackass and is lying about the amount of detailed info the university has in its possession. IMO they got nothin’.*
*Nothing they can prove on any group.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Michael:
Actually, I don’t. I’m all about teaching my students practical things–we do that in the Humanities, regardless of what you might think. Sure, I like to throw some abstractions in there as well, but practicality is high on my list. But my point–which you so neatly glossed over–is that even if I were trying to fill empty heads, I can’t. I point them in the right direction, I point out things they might want to fill their heads with, I even show them more effective ways of filling their heads, but I don’t do the filling–students fill their heads themselves.
Ron
@Michael: Okay, you are just an ass. You basically have made it clear that you expect faculty to magically pass on the content to their students without any actual effort from the students, or barring that ability, that students who are willing/able to pay for their education should just get a degree and we shouldn’t actually do anything silly like assess what the students have learned. You really are saying “I paid my money, give me my degree” and if that is what you really think you are a worthless member of society.
ricky
@Mnemosyne:
You are an insufferable sort. If I told you Columbus was an ass, you would accuse me of siding with those who felt the earth was flat.
I asked what are the ethics of calling a course offering to 600 students an education. I did it twice. You never answered that question, which was and is unrelated to any event which took place in the “class.” You failed my test. And you probably have what passes for an education from a similar institution.
Ron
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): This is what I was trying to get at too. I have students who literally did not come to one class between exams. Shockingly, they failed the exams miserably. I can do nothing for a student who isn’t willing to make an effort.
balki
@Marc:
I read both of the articles you linked, and while they use the term “exam key”, they seem to use it interchangeably with “test bank”. I don’t see any support in either article suggesting that any student had the answers to their specific test. As I mentioned in another post up-thread (ridiculously long thread, so I understand if you missed it), but the Orland Sentinel reports that the midterm was given over multiple days, and that a computer selected new questions for every day. If true, this would likely rule out the suggestion that anyone had only the answers to their specific test.
Michael
@Ron:
It isn’t going to work well at all. It’ll be a fucking disaster, but no more so than opting against a sane vocational training system with a generalized requirement that everybody should just pay to “go to college” as preparation for white collar work, whether it makes sense or not.
Look, I’ve been resentfully snarking for hours today, but the real bottom line is that my personal level of respect for the college experience is really low, that most of the things I’ve learned have come from my interest in topics historical, linguistic and political, and I’m not alone. I think I had three sets of classes that I really enjoyed and that I felt like I learned something from – the first set was my language instuction, the second was a set of Russian history classes (the prof was an asshole who hit on the women) and the third set invoved some local urban history that involved original research. I’m not a complete philistine, but if I’m this negative, I know there are others who are going to be ready to simply defund the things and walk away from higher education altogether.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Ron:
Actually, if you want to get a job, go get a job. Unless you’re planning on working in a field that requires advanced training, going to college isn’t always necessary. The wealthiest person I personally know didn’t even finish high school–he went to work silk-screening shirts when he was 17, started his own shop when he was 26, and now has a net worth in the low 7-figures.
Marc
@Corner Stone:
There are plenty of jobs where you actually need to demonstrate that you know something that you learned in college.
There are some where the credentials are all that counts.
Pretending that the latter class is the only one is bullshit, plain and simple. You damn well better have engineers who know how to build a bridge and scientists who know their subject matter, for some pretty obvious examples.
geg6
Here is what I said:
Here is what you said I said:
Not exactly the same thing. Though, I must say, that almost all the Teabaggers I know cheat at something, whether it’s their employers or their taxes or their spouses or whatever. So, though that’s not what I said originally, I will take that as an accurate impression of my feelings about Teabaggers.
Edited to add: As for why I mentioned Teabaggers in the first place, the dumping on professors and universities sounds an awful lot like “anti-elitism” to me.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone:
So it’s not only here that people have a hard time distinguishing your performance-based criticism from your sour grapes and bitter whining? :P
Ron
@Michael: I can’t speak for your experiences because I wasn’t there. I’m by no means a perfect teacher, and I have room for improvement. But I care about my students and will do what I can to help them succeed. The idea that “I had a bad experience, therefore the whole system sucks” is pretty ridiculous. And we put thought into what we consider a “general education” requirement. It’s not just “we think you need some additional stuff” but we have areas we consider important and require students to take at least one course relevant to those areas.
Mnemosyne
@ricky:
This is what you said:
Since you want me to discuss the ethics of having 600 students in a class and call having classes that large a “fraudulent enterprise,” it’s hard for me to come to any conclusion other than that you’re saying the students were justified in cheating because (you feel) they’re being cheated on their education.
Then I don’t understand the relevance of your question unless you’re searching for justification for the students cheating. If that’s not your point, then you’re trying to change the subject to something completely unrelated.
Marc
@balki:
I just can’t see how you get a detectable shift in the exam grades under those circumstances. Averages for large classes such as this are amazingly stable – to get a change as large as the one illustrated in the video requires something extraordinary.
Basically, it’s years of experience teaching moderate classes that tells me this was active cheating, not innocent distribution of long lists of possible questions. Granted, a lot of the public discussions here seem muddy – but you just don’t give tests to hundreds of people where they get a C on average like clockwork and suddenly have half the class get an A on them.
It never happens except with massive and systemic cheating.
FormerSwingVoter
Heh. You guys crack me up.
PROTIP: College students are not there to learn. They’re there to get a degree. And to get drunk and/or high as much as possible now that they’re no longer living with mommy and daddy.
…
…or am I projecting too much from my own experience?
Michael
@Ron:
Here’s another of my points – you can be the greatest faculty member of all, turning a mushy undergrad brain into a sharply focused tool of accomplishment and balance, and that isn’t going to matter one whit if the larger society doesn’t really care about what you turned out, nor is it willing to compensate that graduate according to his abilities.
Stated alternatively, academics need to start selling the value of what they’re turning out, lest the customer base fold up.
I blame a combination of things here – lazy guidance office people, an unwillingness of academics to get out in public and mingle without seeming effete, an insufficient amount of coordination between administration and faculty to present the value of well-rounded graduates to business, government and the like.
I’m afraid, though, that Pandora has sprung her box with far too many folks over the past couple of generations.
adolphus
@Adam C:
I agree with everything you said here to a point. A lot of people on both sides of this issue seem to be assuming an awful lot not “in evidence” as they say across the quad at the Law School.
To carry on that tradition, let me add my own unsupported conjecture.
I don’t know what the process is for this university for investigating these issues. Typically, though it takes an official complaint by a professor to open an official investigation by an investigatory body or office. If I read this video correctly, this professor has not yet done so, but at 7:00 am on Sunday he will. At that point, typically but maybe not at this school, all evidence is turned over to the appropriate office who conducts an investigation with a whole lot more power than a professor. For example, I’ll bet the investigatory body has access to all email sent to and from the campus system. Professors don’t have that as far as I know. Couple that with the statistical analysis, student testimony, and other evidence I suspect they can get pretty good idea who “cheated,” “stole,” or whatever you want to call it.
So why offer a Tom Sawyeresque deal? I can think of two reasons.
1. I may be naive, but I don’t think most students are cheaters. Yes, they are if they cheat, technically, but I think most students respond to situations and opt for short cuts when desperate. I would not want to ruin someone’s life for being weak. I might therefore offer this deal for first time offenders. Give them a chance to atone.
2. The same reason the criminal justice system plea bargains. Both sides gain something. The college might be able to forgo expensive and time consuming investigations, or at least mitigate the expense and time involved in one that is inevitable. The cheating student removes uncertainty. Yes he or she is admitting to something bad for which he or she will have some consequences. But if the investigation turns up strong evidence that I cheated or stole or whatever (How certain would I be that one of my emails doesn’t incriminate me in something?) there could even harsher consequences and they could come after I have received a degree and even gotten a job, in which case I could be fired.
The big losers here are of course the students who didn’t cheat. Now that the results of the exam are in question, with more investigation to come, what is the option for them?
Seriously. What are the options? Let the exam stand, in which case every grade and GPA from that class, if not the school, will have an asterisk. As a potential employer or graduate school admissions committee how can I take that year’s GPA rankings seriously? How does that not punish the honest students?
Could they deep six the whole exam and let final grades be determined by the remaining assessments? How does that not punish the honest students?
Again, faced with pretty convincing evidence that cheating or some other chicanery happened on a grand scale, even before an official investigation by those with whatever passes for subpoena power on a campus, what can the administration, college, or professors do at this point that would mitigate the damage and NOT negatively impact the honest students? I am open to suggestions.
Corner Stone
@Marc:
I agree completely. But this goes to my point about revamping higher education.
We as a society may continue to believe that forcing an engineer to take 30 hours of Eng Lit or 30 hours of something else helps society turn out well rounded citizens but IMO that just isn’t the case.
We turn out engineers or architects that largely spend the rest of their life educating themselves on their chosen profession.
And outside of those professions I would argue that the degree is a check mark. I’m not going to tell you what my BS is in but it certainly had nothing to do with my first “real” job and is only barely related to my PhD in the most tangential of ways.
FlipYrWhig
@Michael:
I think the Michael Berube notion of “What’s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?” is useful here. A liberal-arts education, ideally, is about dialogue and questioning and cultivating habits of mind that are portable and applicable to life outside of higher education. That’s not the same thing as “learning something” in the sense of facts only an expert would know. You’re right, that’s more the province of the German “polytechnic” model where you learn the state of the art in work-specific skills, which is what my great-grandfather did when he went to agriculture school.
You probably don’t get that in a liberal-arts education. What you get instead is an arena for critical thinking, interchange, and dialogue. Some people can make spaces of their own that work that way, but most can’t, and that’s what college along liberal-arts lines is and will be Good For.
MattR
@Mnemosyne:
Apparently you missed my point. The reason why it is nearly impossible for the cheaters to improve their score by 45 points is that it would require that they would have had an average score of 55 without cheating which is highly doubtful when we are talking about a third of the class (that has an average of 75 as a whole).
I draw absolutely zero conclusions about whether or not that indicates there was cheating going on. In fact you can’t draw any conclusions about cheating based on the grade distribution. All you can say is that something out of the ordinary went on, which we know is true. There is no argument that students received a list of questions in advance and that a subset of those questions were on the actual exam. But how they received the questions and whether they knew the exam would include those questions are the ones that determine if it was cheating and there is no way to figure it out from the grade distribution.
dr. bloor
@Ron:
Given that the test publisher is hot under the collar about the circulation of the test bank, they were probably questions that had been developed and subsequently standardized with respect to item difficulty–think “potential pool of SAT items” rather than “study guide from the back of the chapter.” Also think “A buttload of money to develop,” which is why publishers get upset about it.
Particularly in large courses, profs use them because they provide a viable way to assess large groups of students, and the degree of difficulty is more consistent over time than would be exams generated by the prof on a term-by-term basis.
Brian S (formerly Incertus)
@Corner Stone: You’re overstating the amount of outside courses anyone has to take outside their major by a significant degree, and I suspect you know that.
balki
@geg6: Of course we would expect the distribution to be the same, all things equal. In this case, it’s not all things equal. Clearly the test bank was THE differentiating factor here. It definitely gave those who had it an edge. Out of the 700 questions on it, all 55 of the test questions were on it. All I’m saying is that the students who had it likely had no reason to suspect that their test questions would be on it, because the prof specifically stated that he writes his own questions.
I’m not saying that the results aren’t skewed or that the test should stand as-is. I’m just saying that, based on what I’ve read so far, the students who had it may have only used it thinking it was another study aid.
Adam C in post 322 makes the essentially same point, but phrased differently (and probably more clearly than I just did).
dr. bloor
@FormerSwingVoter:
A lot of us managed all three. They’re not mutually exclusive, you know.
balki
Sorry, my last post was in response to Marc @362, not geg6.
FlipYrWhig
@Michael:
Well, you know, there are different ways to answer what you mean implicitly by “accomplishment” and “abilities.” But the idea behind the “liberal arts” is supposed to be that you learn not just a body of knowledge but some versatile skills and habits.
It’s true, as you say, that it feels more like a farce lately to write recommendation letters for students applying to grad school in the humanities, because there just aren’t academic jobs to accommodate them, and the credential isn’t going to do them very much good in non-academic jobs either. But it is possible, I am quite confident, that liberal-arts training produces both curiosity and skepticism, qualities that are each in short supply in this country, and which vast numbers of people left to their own devices never do manage to cultivate.
Corner Stone
@FlipYrWhig:
Ha. In class it was a defense because the very first thing a Prof who is an asshole does is say, “Ah, they have a C+ but wanted a B-.” And completely ignore their role in the equation.
When I’m the only person in a class of 60+ who has an average above 90 with an A- and the class average is C- or worse it gives my position a little weight.
I had a Prof start every semester by telling his students that more than half of them would fail his class. And he was giddy about it. Who’s fault is that? Asshole.
I argue for what I believe in here, just like I did at school. I earned every penny of it. And if they didn’t like hearing about it they couldn’t pie me there.
numbskull
@Steve: It’s collective punishment. Period. As a professor, I would never do it. The unethical actions of some students in no way would justify my reacting in an unethical fashion.
It’s particularly egregious because the prof claims to know exactly who cheated and who did not. If this is the case, then how does he justify taking ANY action that affects the 400 non-cheaters? If he knows who cheated, he simply removes the cheaters, and their tests, from the class. Problem solved.
Think of it in a simpler scenario. Let’s say you caught ONE student cheating. Should the exams of 599 students be tossed and everyone made to take a new exam? Of course not. OK, how about you caught TWO students. Should the exams of 598 students be tossed and everyone made to take a new exam? Of course not.
Now keep doing that up to 200. Or 300. Or hell, 599. Let’s say you KNOW that 599 students cheated and you KNOW that ONE did not. Why should that ONE student, who you KNOW is innocent, be punished or even inconvenienced?
As to Constitutionality, you think a suit needs a Constitutional foundation to move forward? You most certainly can bring suit for any number of things that happen in academia, in the business world, in life in general, and you can prevail, without resorting to constitutional law.
Michael
@dr. bloor:
Could also be a case of a little astroturf Intellectual Property fauxtrage.
Corner Stone
@Brian S (formerly Incertus): I haven’t been in undergrad in a while. Of the 120+ hours needed IIRC, aren’t 30 hours or so outside of the major and minor? How many is it now?
MattR
@Corner Stone: One of my favorite professors gave out mostly A’s. He told us the first day of class that he used to teach based on a curve. After several years he was able to figure out what a typical grade distribution was. As an experiment, he used those numbers as a baseline for grading future students instead of creating a curve based on the current class. He found that the grades of the entire class shot up to the point where he was able to gradually move the baselines up (IIRC you needed about 80% to get an A) and still hand out 75% A’s in a given semester.
MattR
@Corner Stone: Just looked up the current requirements for my computer science degree. They have 30 hours in the humanites/social sciences.
@Corner Stone: I assume he did talk to the dean beforehand or he would have been in big trouble when this all went viral. I can’t imagine he would be dumb enough to bluff something like that when he knows it is going out over the Internet.
Corner Stone
Like others, I am having a hard time nailing down any of the facts of this episode. How do we know anything Quinn tells us is true? How do we know he has contacted anyone about this?
Corner Stone
@MattR: I actually meant the publisher and/or the colleagues in Atlanta that are mentioned.
People keep using the excuse that “if the publisher is threatening legal action then you know something’s wrong!”
I’d just like a more detailed account but I’m pretty sure we won’t ever get one. Too many people with many reasons not to share.
ETA I should have been more clear on who I meant. If he’s going to scrap 600 test scores he better have told his boss about it. If my child called me after this I’d be pretty hot under the collar, so Quinn better have at least minimal cya.
Eric U.
I’ve told my Ph.D. advisor multiple times that there are copies of his tests out in the wild and that people use them to cheat. He still gives the same tests. It is really an unfair way to award grades and I find it infuriating.
So yes, I blame any professor that gives out a test that will allow this simple form of cheating. Even in an extremely cooperative group of students, there will be students that are left out of the loop who get lower grades than they should.
MaskedBandit
I did encounter a really bad instance of cheating. As a CS major, I spent a decent amount of time in the computer labs. While I was goofing off one day, there was one woman I met who needed some help understanding concepts for a computer assignment. I helped her with the basic concepts without writing the assignment for her.
Afterward, I talked a bit with her, and she admitted that the assignment wasn’t even hers. Some guy had physically intimidated her, threatening to harm her if she didn’t do his assignment. I encouraged her to report him to the police or administration, but she refused.
I didn’t know her name at the time, and she never told me what the other person’s name was.
FlipYrWhig
@Corner Stone: We have 120 credit-hours required for graduation: 36-48 in the major, 30 for distribution requirements (which can overlap with the major). Thus every student takes at least 42 credits that are “elective” in the purest sense. This is a liberal-arts college.
SectarianSofa
@Karmakin:
And, I call bullshit. Obviously, there are study methods that involve a comprehensive mastery of the material. Sorry, but you’ve cheated yourself and/or your prof/university has cheated you if you’ve found otherwise.
FlipYrWhig
@Eric U.: Virtually all professors loathe grading and will follow the path of least resistance to avoid changing their grading habits. In fact, my sense is that most professors view grading not as a means of evaluating students fairly against each other but as a kind of ritual that they do because it has always been done. They’d rather get it done quickly than get it done fairly. It takes me forever to grade stuff, and it is not fun, but it offends my sense of fair play to cut corners like your professor appears to be comfortable doing.
SectarianSofa
@Steve:
Bingo. They know better.
Mark E. Smith
@James E. Powell: Thank you. The ones who cheated are getting off. Total impunity, just like in the real world. They’ll be the banksters and fraudsters of tomorrow.
And the reason they’re getting off is because the college doesn’t want to lose their tuition money, or one of their parents threatened to pull an endowment.
We live in a country that fits Mussolini’s definition of fascism, the merger of government with business. These were business students, capitalist, imperialist, fascists.
Of course they cheat, steal, and lie. That’s what this country was built on, genocide and slavery. And that’s how we survive today, genocide in Africa to get the metals and gems to build and fund the military establishment we need to get the oil to run the wars to get the oil to run the wars to get the oil…..
In Russia the word biznezman means gangster. These are gangsters in training, and the teacher is the trainer. The corporations they will found or work for will outsource jobs to find the cheapest labor, hire crooked accountants to cover up their sleazy deals, and buy politicians who will deregulate them, make everything they do legal, and take money from working Americans to bail out the capitalist pigs who don’t create jobs and take no risks when they profit from other people’s suffering.
Their foods and drugs will poison our children and they will never see a day in jail. The laws that govern their businesses make it mandatory for them to kill Americans if that is the best way to maximize profits for their shareholders.
And the lesson the teacher taught them is that crime pays and that they will never pay for their crimes–the innocents who didn’t cheat are the ones being punished, as usual.
SectarianSofa
@Walker:
I certainly expected more than a clean test re-take in this case.
Steven
What a salesman. Don’t they see in his language and drama that every confessing conscience is the data they need for the “forensic stats analysis!” What a joke. Also, since when is 7am on Monday – Midnight Wed = 51 hours? That’s 41 hours last time I checked. Maybe my test bank is compromised! LMAO
VincentN
It Is annoying watching two sides talk past each other. I don’t think anybody is justifying cheating. What we have here are definitional differences of what constitutes cheating.
adolphus
@numbskull:
Actually I don’t think the professor says he knows exactly who cheated. He says he can produce a list of possible cheaters that he can pretty much guarantee that all the cheaters are on that list, but he cannot guarantee all the people on that list are cheaters. I am not statistician, but it sounds like he is claiming a 5% false positive rate and a 0% false negative rate. Bold claim, to be sure, but I believe he says that they WILL find out exactly who the cheaters once the dean’s office starts an official investigation which I assume will include taking student testimony and searching student emails on the school server. I don’t think that is such a bold claim. With 200 potential co-conspirators with a correspondence trail I suspect they will sing more than the cast of Glee. But this investigation will likely extend past the end of the semester. The professor is faced with the conundrum of what to do NOW to restore faith in the grades of his students. There is no easy answer.
I agree his solution could be construed as collective punishment and you say you would never do that. Okay, we know what you wouldn’t do, but faced with strong evidence of widespread cheating on a major assessment what would you do? What steps would you take to ensure the integrity of your course and grades without somehow punishing the honest students?
To be quite frank, if you did nothing, I am not sure how I, as a potential employer, intern supervisor, or graduate school admissions committee member could ever take your students’ transcripts (or those from your entire college now that this has made the news and the video has gone viral) seriously. How would I ever read letter of recommendation from you without thinking to myself “but how does he KNOW this student did well on those tests?”
I am not being snarky here. I really would like to know what you would do if faced with the same evidence of cheating that would return some integrity to your class without somehow punishing the honest students? I may be faced with possibly hiring one of this guy’s or college’s students one day and I may teach another class someday and I can think of no better solution than what he proposed, as imperfect as it may be. But I am wide open to suggestions.
SectarianSofa
@VincentN:
Apparently a lot of people here didn’t actually watch the video. For instance, the test bank in question belonged to the textbook publisher, wasn’t public, wasn’t from a frat, etc..
SectarianSofa
@Mnemosyne:
Of course, because as in classes, life is made of facts. All you have to do is memorize the appropriate subset for your particular niche or avenue of opportunity, and you win!
Fuck.
Yep, if this thread was a test on ethics, those of you who got the ‘test bank’ before-hand have displayed your mastery by giving the correct answers!
SectarianSofa
@Bobby Thomson:
He did look kind of old. Also, 600 students.
Kidding aside, does seem suspiciously third rate. Maybe not, but I always had essay tests, or at least some large chunk with essays.
Mark E. Smith
If you want to see some real cheating on tests, try this:
MIKE ELK: HONEYWELL CHEATED ON SCAB WORKER SAFETY TESTS, LEADING TO ACCIDENT THAT NEARLY KILLED AN ENTIRE TOWN
Mike Elk: Honeywell Cheated on Scab Worker Safety Tests, Leading to Accident that Nearly Killed an Entire Town
http://mediapolitics.info/mike-elk-honeywell-cheated-on-scab-worker-safety-tests-leading-to-accident-that-nearly-killed-an-entire-town/
Here, the corporation owned by a captain of industry, one of Obama’s biggest supporters and closest advisers, helped people cheat on the test to work at a uranium enrichment plant.
Kay Shawn
This thread has me throwing up. Who are all these mealy-mouthed cheating justifiers????? Fuck all of you.
SectarianSofa
@Michael:
Moron.
HyperIon
@jeff:
I did not click on the video link but I saw it (or one of its variants) a couple of weeks ago. In the one I watched some student comes on at the end and says explicitly “Everybody cheats. What’s the big deal?”
Maybe Michael is that guy.
This sort of reminds me of the thread over at the Chronicle of Higher Ed last week. They published an article purported to be from a guy who works for a company that sells essays (and dissertations evidently). The comments were very interesting.
I gotta say when I was in the teaching biz I laughed when students requested a take home test.
SectarianSofa
@Vlad:
Jesus. Analogy fail. Counting cards? Really?
Anonymous37
They have 30 hours in the humanites/social sciences.
There is something of an inflation in humanities/social sciences credits compared to science, math, and engineering credits: a 5 credit humanities class often requires much less study time than a 3 or even 1 credit science/engineering class. Or at least that was the case back when I was an undergraduate; perhaps a more recent graduate can tell me if that still holds true.
balki
@Kay Shawn: Read the entire thread before you judge, douchebag. If you don’t have time to read all 400 comments then you’re probably not in a position to judge.
Allison Wonderland
This guy is all bluster.
When it comes down to it, the “deal” he supposedly negotiated with the school is this: if you cheated, admit it, and you have to take a 4-hour ethics class. Yes, the cheater has to retake the mid-term, but so does someone who did not cheat. The cheater’s course grade isn’t effected, the cheater isn’t expelled, the incident doesn’t go on the cheater’s transcript, and the cheater doesn’t have to go up in front of the student ethics board (which are pretty hard on cheaters, because they consist of student members).
The college has very little interest in actually enforcing the ethics rules; it would mean expelling 200 students and subsequently forgoing the future tuition of those students. The noise is sufficient to maintain the credibility of the institution for those not paying attention.
TomG
Not much to add except that I’m 46 and I’ve known since 6th grade that there are “teacher’s editions” of books and that they include extra material the students aren’t supposed to see.
I don’t see how the teacher implying he writes his own questions is really relevant. To me, the question is, how many of those 205 students knew where the study guide came from (i.e. that it was stolen from the publisher’s server) ? Anyone who knew that, and still used it, cheated.
I suspect (but am not sure) that the test bank includes the correct answers marked.
I also think, though, that professors in 2010 are incredibly naive if they don’t realise that test bank questions are frequently obtained by students from the internets.
HyperIon
Of course back in my GOOD OLD college days, we had an honor code. Every test you took was covered by that.
If you cheated, you had better not tell anyone because then they might turn you in as knowing about cheating was considered cheating. These days the folks doing the turning in would probably be vilified as rats.
I’m sure cheating was still occurring but at least there was a system in place that was supposed to address it. And the cheaters had a real incentive to STFU.
PS when i comment, i never get an edit button until I reload the page.
FlipYrWhig
@Anonymous37: I don’t know what you’re used to in terms of credits converting to hours, but, in general, if you’re in a humanities class _and do the reading_ (always an open question), that’s going to take hours upon hours per week. And then writing a halfway decent essay a couple of times per semester takes a hell of a long time too. But it’s been 20 years since I had anything to do with a class that wasn’t humanities, either taking or teaching.
SectarianSofa
@Anonymous37:
Do you really think that this is or ever has been uniformly true across different institutions? I certainly worked less on the science/math courses I had. Even that depends on the accumulated knowledge and aptitude of the student and the demands of the particular university course. You could know everything about calculus, but that doesn’t work for lit, history, philosophy, etc. unless you’re taking a survey course.
MAJeff
@FlipYrWhig:
Read? Write? Whatchutalkingabout?
FlipYrWhig
@HyperIon:
Really? I think it depends on the subject. Something like identifying passages absolutely can’t be done at home, but take-home essays aren’t the kinds of things you can cheat on in any advantageous way. I guess students could cut and paste from websites, but, you know, it’s not that hard to tell when they’ve done that, because 19-year-olds just don’t have the same lofty tone that older critics–professional and amateur alike–tend to affect.
FlipYrWhig
@MAJeff: Come on, Melville, tell me what I need to know about whaling and let’s call this a goddamn day!
numbskull
@adolphus: Adolphus, thanks for asking.
It is collective punishment as soon as you state that you know some students didn’t cheat. Let’s not pretend otherwise. The solution of making ALL students re-take the exam is punishing for those who did not cheat.
As I said, regardless of the actions of some students, I would not react unethically; certainly I would do everything to ensure that I didn’t.
What I think I would do is…nothing for this particular instance. Rather 10 guilty go free than one innocent be punished.
Now, going forward, I would re-assess how I taught the course and created exams. I’ve been doing this since ’92, so I haven’t experienced everything, but I have had to deal with cheaters and had to seriously re-examine my exam creation and policy (pun intended). Sometimes you just have to chalk bad experiences up to, well, experience, and make corrections for the future.
As to all this hand-wringing about maintaining the reputation of the University, well shit, given what I saw on the video and what appears to be accepted SOP at this guy’s Uni, any concern about rep and stature is more than a day late and a dollar short.
SectarianSofa
@FlipYrWhig:
Perfect.
SectarianSofa
@numbskull:
The thing that I’m surprised no one has commented on is the fact the prof says that for the make-up exam, non-cheaters included, that even if you’re about to give birth, too bad, you still have to come to the make-up exam and have the baby there. Disturbing. Now, the question is whether it is obvious to any reasonable student that this is hyperbole, and that exemptions will still be actually given.
HyperIon
@grendelkhan:
I see you got there before me.
HyperIon
@FlipYrWhig:
yeah, i was teaching chemistry.
moreover, this gets into some of the distance learning “issues”. how can one ever be sure that the person submitting “work done out of class” actually did that work?
numbskull
@SectarianSofa: You know what? Doesn’t matter what the circumstances are for any of the individual NON-cheaters. They did nothing wrong, they should not be punished. Arguing otherwise is simply allowing convenience/greed/laziness to play into what should be an extreme ethical learning moment for EVERYONE involved.
The Kleig lights are on not just on the students here. Bright lights are being shown on the the professor and the administration, too.
So far, they do not impress.
MikeF
@numbskull: Nailed it, IMHO. The prof is punishing 400 innocent students by springing a last-minute test with zero flexibility with regards to timing no matter what schedule conflicts it might create. He seems to take a perverse satisfaction in that, as if the non-cheaters should be inconvenienced to teach them how severe their classmates’ sins were.
In the same speech, he tells the cheaters “we know who you are, and we know where you are” and blabbers about “forensic” methods of finding the perpetrators, including monitoring “traffic” over “environments”, whatever that means. So which is it? Can they identify the cheaters? If so, the ethical move is to offer clemency to cheaters who fess up, and give them a re-take of the test, along with an ethics seminar. Maybe dock a bunch of points off their re-tests. Let the investigation continue, and treat harshly anyone who is found to cheat but didn’t fess up.
If they can’t really identify the cheaters, then the prof is lying to his students about the investigation’s likely effectiveness (in his big ethics speech, no less). In that case, the correct move is to make everyone re-take the test, but be flexible about schedule conflicts, understanding that 2/3 of the students did nothing wrong and may have legitimate excuses for the hours of the re-test.
Bottom line, the prof took the easy way out by copy-pasting the test from some publisher’s website, and he took the easy way out by ‘fixing’ the problem with a punitively inflexible re-test schedule. I hope he at least helped his TAs formulate the new test.
Corner Stone
@SectarianSofa:
Well, since apparently God is the only entity that can overrule Quinn’s “no exceptions” rule, I doubt the students are spending a lot of time considering the question.
SectarianSofa
@numbskull:
Ideally, sure. I suppose the best thing, which might not be the ideal thing, would be dependent on and mediated by the exigencies of the particular conditions and context. Unless of course you want a scantron-type answer for a moral dilemma, in which case you have a suboptimal (with regard to ‘Truth,’ if any exists) forced choice situation. (And who is the arbiter of moral dilemmas?) I tend go with whatever the FSM dictates, or if that fails, I attempt to reason out the least crappy option.
Nutella
@numbskull:
I would think that the most ethical thing that the teacher could do is to quietly add more tests between now and the end of the class that will dilute the effect of this compromised test, with all the new test questions being the original work of the teacher and NOT taken from any database anywhere.
It would be a tougher question if this had been the final exam. Then a makeup test would be unavoidable.
Corner Stone
@numbskull:
Agreed. This is one of those rare random events I would actually like more follow up on.
What happens next?
SectarianSofa
@Corner Stone:
Well, ‘God’s handwriting’ would fall under the scope of the question. Is that requirement hyperbole?
But, nevermind. 600 students. I’m only playing devil’s lawyer, or what have you. But I’m surprised it hasn’t come up.
I do know about a case where something like this happened, and the student failed a course (final test or paper) because they assumed the expressed exclusion of the prof was literal. The professor argued that it was the student’s fault that the student did not realize that some cases would have trumped the given ‘no excuses’ statement. (The prof learned after the fact that the student had a quite legitimate life-consuming event that blocked his presence at the test, but did not offer any remedy.)
FlipYrWhig
@HyperIon: Yeah, I’m not sure a true seminar can ever come to pass via distance learning. I mean, if what you want out of a class is to know dates and place names and who said what, well, you can just google those, and you don’t need a professor, or to pay anyone money.
If the professor’s role is to deliver facts, and the student’s role is to retain the minimum number of those facts as meets the standard for “passing”–or just to fake it for the test–and neither side is interested in actually knowing the material (rather than the pre-programmed answers) or having it assessed responsibly, then the whole enterprise of higher education starts to be about as stupid as Michael was making it sound earlier.
FlipYrWhig
@Nutella:
Yeah, this guy doesn’t strike me as the kind willing to knock himself out like that. But, again, most professors loathe grading and just want it to be over with as little pain as possible. Whether the students actually know things pales in importance beside getting grades on papers, fast. That’s why most exams you’ve ever taken suck so badly. They’re designed with the overriding imperative of being able to be graded quickly.
Corner Stone
Professor Quinn gives me a case of the redass. He seems like a jackass who got caught in his own jackassery and is now bullying a lot of students because he can.
adolphus
@numbskull:
Well answered, but, again honest initial response here, wouldn’t allowing 200 people to (possibly/allegedly) cheat on a major exam and profit from it also piss off the honest students? I am pretty sure it doesn’t rise to the level of punishment, but it certainly is poke in the eye.
If I studied hard for it and had knowledge of cheaters, especially if I declined the opportunity to cheat, and they got away with it, I wouldn’t do so quietly. I might certainly be more inclined to cheat the next time.
I don’t know how you don’t kick this up to the next level of investigation to find the perpetrators.
edit: According to posts at UCF 200 is not alleged, it is confirmed with more to follow as investigations progress.
Midnight Marauder
@Michael:
And the award for “Least Surprising Comment of The Day” goes to…
John Bird
The Cheating Culture, 2002.
SectarianSofa
@Corner Stone:
Giving you redass — definitely unethical.
shecky
I was kinda skeeved out by the idea that so many students had been caught cheating. But after reading the know details, particularly those contributed by balki, it’s looking much less so. Yup, it’s looking like the worst offense might be that the test pool questions were obtained illegally. But cheating? Not so much.
At this point, it’s not clear that the presumed cheaters had the answer key, or even could. Furthermore, if what they had were the test pool questions, it seems quite plausible that they never even had any intention to cheat, since they might have understood the prof to make up his own questions.
I’m guessing word leaked out about the test pool being passed around, and the prof felt he had to act on it because 1) if he didn’t, it would appear that he took a weak view on cheating once existence of the test pool was common knowledge, and
2) he didn’t actually write his own questions, and because of his bluff, the “cheaters” actually did have an advantage.
Ironically, it may be that the “cheaters” might actually know the material better than those who did not, since they presumably had a pool of several hundred questions they’ had to study/memorize in order to pass a test made up of just a fraction of those questions.
Once all the info is revealed, the accused cheaters may or may not be smelling like a rose. But the prof doesn’t really impress me regardless.
Anacreon
As a professor, myself, I have some sympathy for this professor’s hurt and frustration. I have caught students plagiarizing, and it can mess with your mind trying to decide what to do to be “fair” to everyone in the class, the cheater included. Many professors work hard, have played by the rules their whole career (and have taken jobs that pay less that their peers outside the academy!), love their subject matter, and have this naive hope that their students are doing the same. I truly believe his disillusionment and hurt are genuine, and it shows in his demeanor and fluster.
One thing I also noted is that the professor is so upset that he relies a little much on pathos. He plays both the good cop and bad cop all at once. He knows who you are and you are doomed, but he’s also cut a good deal for you – you just have to turn yourself in! As a prof, what I read into this is that he has some idea about who cheated, but he probably can’t be sure, and he’s bluffing by using magical forensic analysis (“I dare you to take the gamble!”) and Academic Affair boogeymen (“they’re not happy!”) to try to get people to out themselves. In actuality, it would be very hard to prove anything from the exam itself, and the officials at Academic Affairs are probably indeed not happy but as much with having to do something as with the students. Students turning themselves and one another in will be their best evidence.
Whether getting the answers from the test bank is cheating or not seems worth debating. Whatever your answer, I do think the professor would be within his rights to re-exam the class using a new and homemade exam. And assuming the homemade exam was well-constructed and similar to the first exam in structure, he could do an analysis on the difference between Exam 1 and Exam 2 scores. Falling scores would suggest lack of true learning.
Had I been this professor, I would have given the new exam right away, in that class, without explanation except to say that the first exam had been thrown out. I would explain afterward.
For what it’s worth, there have been a lot of glib responses that the professor is “lazy” because he used a test bank for questions. In actuality, it is quite challenging to create new and *good* multiple choice questions every semester. Items have to be written very carefully so they are not ambiguous, and they have to be a certain number from all parts of what has been taught so that the exams reflect the course adequately. Professors are under increasing pressure (for good or ill), sometimes by the same glib folks who want them to write homemade exams, to have precise statistical proof that their exams are also reliable and valid. This is exceedingly difficult, and test banks offer a way to provide items that supposedly have been reviewed this way. Professors also can use test banks to show to the university that they have a way to assess and demonstrate they are teaching (and that students are learning) the material in the syllabus.
dr. bloor
@shecky:
So, in summary, you didn’t read anything else in the thread, did you?
suzanne
This reminds me of my college roommate of three years, who was also a business major. She pledged a coed business frat that, for all I could tell, was just a group of business students who got drunk a lot and acted like assholes. One night while she was pledging, three other students who were pledging got caught stealing beer or something from a local store for one of the frat’s parties that weekend. The members of the frat were torn about whether or not stealing should disqualify the pledges from the frat, and my roommate was horrified that something “minor” like stealing was seen by some as such a horrible thing to do.
I mentioned that I was of the opinion that they should get their asses kicked out in short order, and she says to me, “How can you say that? They have SO MUCH school spirit!” When I brought up that stealing is a violation of business ethics, she looked at me funny.
But what do I know? I was an art major.
dr. bloor
@Anacreon:
He most certainly is. Everyone is framing this as the noncheaters being punished, but the real issue is that the professor needs all 600 students tested on the same “playing field” to get an accurate appraisal of their relative mastery of the material. 400 “probable” noncheaters taking one exam and 200 “probable” cheaters taking another would be a bloody mess.
Parenthetically–and you state as much in your subsequent comments–the professor’s homespun test almost certainly will not be as good a test of the textbook material as the one developed by Pearson. One hopes that he had something to offer the students (and will test them on) more than the stuff contained in the text.
2liberal
@SectarianSofa:
this sounds like one of my old time calculus/physics classes with hundreds in the lectures and about 20 in the lab sections. So the professor is running the overall class but there could be a lot more personal attention in the lab sections.
How do you do a lab in a business class?
Corner Stone
@Ron:
I see in the thread that you teach at a small liberal arts college.
numbskull
@Nutella: Nutella, I appreciate the further thought, but the suggestion you outline STILL results in non-cheaters being punished with the extra tests.
The bottom line is this: Professor Chubby Peach says he knows who cheated. Fine. End of story. Toss the cheaters and move on.
BUT, even if Cubby Cheeks is lying, it doesn’t change the fact that any additional burden (i.e., additional testing) is punishing the innocent. There’s very little wiggle room here.
What are we teaching otherwise?
Corner Stone
@Anacreon:
I would argue results from the subsequent test would prove nothing either way.
First, because he did not write the original exam. I also believe, IMO, that he’s going to let a little bias in for the makeup test. I would wager the makeup test scores drop across the board.
He doesn’t seem to be on too even a keel after this alleged event. Hopefully he allows his TA’s to either write the test or audit the final exam he prepares.
numbskull
@Anacreon:
Weeeeelllll, maybe. Me, I’ve dealt with guys like this. The sooner I can deep six ’em, the better. Students are going to do this shit. It’s bad, unethical, if caught, they need their nuts cut off. But just watching the video of Professor Chubby Peach makes me question so, so many things about his approach. Put simply, if he were on my faculty, it would only be in the past tense. And I’d be reassessing my recruiting approach.
Kay Shawn
I didn’t cheat; I read the entire thread. How old are you???@balki:
numbskull
@dr. bloor:
Boy, I completely, completely disagree with this. Once the cheating is known, there is NO “need” to have the cheaters treated the same as the noncheaters.
If the cheaters and non-cheaters cannot be definitively ID’d, then it’s game over. Suck it up, move on, do better in the future.
adolphus
@numbskull:
I guess the wriggle room is whether you viewed taking a make up in this situation as punishment.
If I imagine myself one of the non-cheaters and watched some of the cheaters prosper, to coin a phrase, I am not sure I would so view it. I would see myself as being punished for NOT cheating and hating the professor and classmates accordingly. Especially if this prof curves grades, and he seems like the type that would. My grade would be negatively effected by their cheating and the prof is doing nothing.
Would you be open to a vote on the issue?
Anonymous37
@FlipYrWhig: I don’t know what you’re used to in terms of credits converting to hours, but, in general, if you’re in a humanities class and do the reading (always an open question), that’s going to take hours upon hours per week. And then writing a halfway decent essay a couple of times per semester takes a hell of a long time too. But it’s been 20 years since I had anything to do with a class that wasn’t humanities, either taking or teaching.
As a science major, I always found that the classes in my major, and in math and computer science, required more hours of work even when I took into account all of the reading necessary in the humanities classes. I wasn’t alone in that assessment, and I should mention that my grades were better in the electives than in my major (but not by much, maybe 0.2 of a GPA).
@SectarianSofa: Do you really think that this is or ever has been uniformly true across different institutions? I certainly worked less on the science/math courses I had. Even that depends on the accumulated knowledge and aptitude of the student and the demands of the particular university course. You could know everything about calculus, but that doesn’t work for lit, history, philosophy, etc. unless you’re taking a survey course.
The units inflation? I had heard from people in other liberal arts universities that it was the case as well. The simple problem is that if the physics department were to let the credits accurately reflect the actual hours of work necessary, students majoring in it would have credit loads 60% higher than in the humanities and social sciences. There were lab classes required for graduation which only gave us 1 credit but required about 10 hours of work a week (students had to average 15 credits a quarter to graduate).
I haven’t had any ongoing interactions with undergraduates in a decade, but I would bet that if you asked engineering students if they view the 30 units of humanities and social science electives as being particularly onerous, as opposed to a nuisance, most would answer no.
Anacreon
@Corner Stone: You said “I would wager the makeup test scores drop across the board.”
Well, if they fall across the board, that can be statistically controlled. You’ll still see who drops the most and how much.
Corner Stone
@adolphus:
Sorry but Cole is the only person around here that gets a vote.
Corner Stone
@Anacreon: But what would it prove? What if I scored very well on the first test. And scored mediocre or below avg on the second one. Maybe a grade and a half below the first score.
Did I cheat?
Eric U.
I had a prof back in the mimeograph days who literally cut and pasted the 4 final exam questions from the 4 tests he had previously given us. Amazingly, there were still people that didn’t do well on the exam.
Marc
@numbskull:
You have a test where a third to a half of the students cheated. You can’t use the results of that test; it’s corrupted and has no information content. Calling this collective punishment is idiotic. You can’t curve it (for the non-cheaters.) You reward actual cheaters. And for what?
And, more to the point, the people who legitimately got a good grade on it the first time will get a good grade the second time. One of the most striking things about quiz grades is the extent to which people get the same grade on every single test.
God, but the atmosphere of excuse-making in this thread is making me ill.
priscianus jr
@Anonymous37: my grades were better in the electives than in my major (but not by much, maybe 0.2 of a GPA).
I’m not sure if this is relevant to your point, but you do realize that survey courses designed for a mix of non-majors and majors (or in some cases, only non-majors) are easier, and are intended to be easier, than courses in your major? This is especially so in English, because most undergraduate programs REQUIRE that all students take at least a minimum of language arts courses, for obvious reasons. A lot of these courses are extremely basic.
adolphus
@Anonymous37:
I am not sure this is directly on point, but I have been involved in TA-ing a class in the humanities aimed specifically at science, math, and technology majors (engineering and computer science) over two semesters. And almost to a person they complain about the reading and writing load and how much work they have to put in relative to their majors. The math majors especially seem to reject the mere idea that they should have to write a coherent analysis of a historic document or secondary reading in the history of mathematics. I’m under no illusion, mind you, that humanities majors wouldn’t have the same complaint in a science class designed for them, but totally based on my own experience and nothing else, yes, they seem to think it an onerous burden.
Gemina13
Good grief. People justifying the students’ cheating, and condemning the professor for making a huge salary. John, I think your old neocon fanbase showed up for this post.
Anonymous37
@priscianus jr:
Fair enough, but the overall course load for humanities majors was far smaller in terms of the number of classes than for the science and engineering majors. The hours of work were far longer for the average “techie” than for the humanities and social science undergraduates. And there was one fact that all of us “techies” noticed: some people left the sciences and engineering majors in their first and second year and were still able to get degrees in the humanities and social sciences. We never noticed the opposite happening.
@adolphus:
Huh. Okay, again, fair enough. I guess I am guilty of over-generalizing.
I should note that I’m not knocking humanities and social science majors; I did know students who took their majors seriously. But every objective indicator I could see back when I was in college (1988 to 1992, if that clarifies things) pointed to science and engineering majors being more difficult and time consuming on average.
numbskull
@Marc: Like I said, Prof. Chubby Peaches has to deal with what happens without being unethical.
You’re arguing for collective punishment whether you want to admit it or not. You somehow seem to think of this in some abstract, statistical manner. It’s not abstract for the innocent.
To be clear and to be complete: If you were on my faculty and you made the argument you have, you’d be toast. Your argument is weak, pathetic, and unethical. I wouldn’t even leave you time to change the voice mail message on your phone. I wouldn’t want you polluting the joint.
And that truly, deeply tells me that you have absolutely no fucking clue. None. Not that such a red herring would alter my stance.
Old School
As a prof, I create new exams every semester. It’s part of the job. I teach 150 – 300 students a semester and I don’t have TA’s nor do I use a computer to do my marking for me.
…hence the moniker “old school”.
About six years ago my office computer was hacked and my midterm distributed. I understand where Doctor Lazy Pants is coming from.
If 1/3 of my students were caught cheating, I’d throw them all into the Thunderdome, (two fools enter, one F leaves). However, I don’t believe that statistics can definitively prove who cheated and who didn’t beyond reasonable doubt, and that makes for a very difficult situation.
I don’t think he needs the bluster about tracking the evildoers down, (unless they really can, which would be great!), but that midterm can’t stand and should be replaced.
Personally, I probably wouldn’t have another midterm. Instead I would change the syllabus mid course, (yes, I’m a bastard!), and add a series of presentations/coursework/and or labor equal to the weight of the midterm. No, it’s not fair to the 2/3 who didn’t cheat, but in this case the only fair thing to do is increase the work load for everyone, cheaters, non-cheaters and instructors as well. No one wins when people cheat.
Back in 2004 my office computer was hacked and the midterm distributed the night before. Unable to prove who had or hadn’t seen it beforehand, this was my only solution. That, and making some sly suggestions for the non-cheaters to wreak retribution.
LiLaf
It sounds to me like the midterm was a take home exam. He says the test will be open from 7:00 am to midnight for the retake. It is probably an online exam. So having access to the test bank means that someone could print out all the available questions with the answers and pass them around. Then when the students were taking the online exam, they just had to look for the question and plug in the correct answer. If that’s the case, I think it is definitely cheating. They weren’t just studying the material by looking over the possible questions and figuring out the answers, then having to remember them well enough to repeat the correct answers during an in class exam. At least that was my impression.
Corner Stone
@Old School:
How would they know? And what would they do?
fasteddie
It takes about 2 minutes on teh google to find which textbook is used for this course and to search for the test bank –
Strategic Management, by Mason A. Carpenter and Wm. Gerard Sanders, 2nd Edition –
search “test bank strategic management carpenter” and you will find that the test bank is available to anyone willing to pay for it. The students didn’t “break in” to a server or “steal” it – they just bought it off the internet. No cloak and dagger – just paypal and a download. The prof should have known better – and made up his own tests.
The students treated it as a study guide and aced it. Flagrant disregard for the availability of these materials is on the professor.
Shade Tail
Calling the white-out of the whole exam and putting a new exam in place “collective punishment” is, at best, a melodramatic exaggeration. There really is no other option that even approaches being as fair as this. The worst you can honestly say is that this puts an unfair burden on everyone who didn’t cheat, including the teacher(s).
But them’s the shakes when a load of assholes try to game the system, whether you’re inside or outside of a classroom. Shoplifters hurt all of us. Go ahead and whine to the store about the “collective punishment” they’re heaping on your head when they raise their prices to compensate. If you’re lucky, they’ll not laugh in your face for being so naive and self-absorbed.
In a case like this, the Professor had no alternative. To say otherwise is to not actually care about academic integrity, no matter how you try to rationalize it.
And he was quite upfront about how they didn’t have the names at the time of this recording. But considering how they cheated (getting a hold of a proprietary test bank from a text book company), there would have been a paper trail (literal or electronic) to follow. To say nothing about how many of the cheaters were openly bragging about this. There’s another easy lead to follow. The professor was probably quite right that they were going to be found.
The only thing I would criticize is letting them off so easy. OK, fine, let them plea-bargain their way out of expulsion if they admit to it, but it ought to be much worse than just taking a four-hour ethics class. Losing a bunch of their credits, perhaps, or at least having it noted on their permanent transcript.
Shade Tail
@fasteddie:
And flagrant disregard for actual ethics and for not cheating in the class is on the students.
Just Some Fuckhead
Meh, if you aren’t cheating, yer really not trying to pass. And that makes you objectively pro-failure. Right?
Adam C
@Shade Tail: Did the professor have a list of resources students were not ‘allowed’ to access?
Given:
a) The professor did not tell students he was taking his questions from the test bank
b) The test bank was easily and legally accessible
I would say that a student would be foolish not to look at the test bank. Many, many commenters in this thread have pointed to courses and departments where looking at test banks was actively encouraged. Why should the students assume that this time it was secretly forbidden?
futzinfarb
@Anacreon:
A forensic analysis of a claim of forensic analysis? My head hurts.
Marc
@numbskull:
Your name is well chosen. You understand nothing about the subject. Here is a hint, since you’re too clueless to get it:
Leaving a test score standing where a bunch of people cheated penalizes the honest, because they got lower scores and lower grades than they would have in a fair test.
Either you want to reward the cheaters or you want to reward the honest. I gather that you want to reward the cheaters, which I suppose is your right. But spare us the pity party about the poor dears having to take a second test. In a case like this I want people to be pissed at the cheats; I want people turning them in. Because in any exam with a curve they hurt the decent folks.
By the way, I have years of teaching to back up my claims about how repeatable (honest) grades are on tests – absent accident/illness, the answer is “highly.”
Edit: although you can’t prove cheating with statistical evidence, you can prove cheating with email records of who passed what to who and the things that they said. It’s pretty clear to me that’s what the forensic evidence is.
balki
@Marc:
You (and others) keep using the word “cheat”. What many of us are arguing is that this does not appear to rise to that level. Setting aside the issue of who is punished or not punished, I have yet to see any evidence in this thread, from you or anyone else, that what the students did qualifies as cheating.
I’ve yet to read anything suggesting that any student obtained the test banks illegally. There is also no evidence that anyone who used the test bank as a study guide did so thinking that it was against any sort of rule–in fact, I’d say that it strains credibility to suggest that 200 people out of 600 would willfully cheat on a midterm exam. Numerous articles (including the one I’ve referenced multiple times in the Orlando Sentinel) state that most of the 200 claim that they did not believe they were breaking any rules. If 1/3 of the class is that confused about the situation, it’s likely that these rules were not made clear.
Yet again: the professor stated that he writes his own test questions. There is nothing magical about a test bank. It’s no different from using old tests (which most universities have on file in libraries). Since the prof said he writes his own tests, there would be no reason to assume that the test bank would have the exact questions.
With regard to your last statement, again, you’re making assumptions not supported by any facts. Do you really believe that the university searched the email records of all 600 students? It’s not even clear that anyone violated any university rules–I seriously doubt UCF’s counsel would let them go to that extreme.
MattR
@balki: I agree with you, but I think even in the most innocent scenario there is still a subset who cheated by obtaining the test bank after other students took the exam and realized it was the source of the actual questions.
FlipYrWhig
@Anonymous37:
I was in college during that exact span of years. My sense is that (1) it is not hard to get a B- or B in a humanities class without putting in a particular effort; that may not be true in a lab science. But (2) if is not easy to get an A in a humanities class without putting in a lot of effort, or at least that’s the way I try to make it work as a professor, and the standard to which I was held–I believe–as a student.
So there are people majoring in humanities fields who are slackers, no doubt, and they might be able to get away with their slackerdom; something like engineering or bio or chem is _designed_ to weed out and punish slackers, and they have to go somewhere. But I think the hardest-working, most-motivated humanities people work at least as much as the tech folk. Humanistic scholarship never has an obvious end; there’s always something else to look up, something else that might be relevant, etc.
My view is that humanities might be easier to do lazily, but it is not easier to do well.
balki
@MattR:
That’s a good point, and one I hadn’t considered. Since the test was taken over multiple days, those taking it on the first day could have noticed the questions were the same as those in the test bank, and could have informed others.
Still, the test questions were reportedly changed for each day of the test (55 questions randomly selected by computer out of the 700 question test bank), so students would have still had to study the entire 700 question list to get the answers. That’s a lot of studying. The students who used it claim that they believed it was a study aid, and I’m inclined to believe them. I find it very hard to believe that so many people would intentionally do something that could get them expelled in their final year.
Cain
@celticdragonchick:
Don’t forget the bit of male chauvenism as well. I was amused and entertained. 100/100. Unless he cheated, in which case a standing ovation is also added.
cain
Recall
@adolphus:
I wouldn’t say anything. I would prepare the final exam the exact same way, while making subtle alterations to ~1/4 of the questions to invalidate the pre-memorized answers. Then make only those questions count towards the grade for the final.
DPirate
Bunch of morons. I got my degrees from an address in Bahamas for about 20$. Cheating was encouraged.
I’m becoming a priest now in 7 religions.
Marc
@balki:
I find it truly sad that you, and others, apparently believe that students can do anything unethical unless a professor specifically says something to the contrary.
Why are you so anxious to make excuses here? It’s obvious that something different happened with this test – something that affected grades on a massive scale, and something that didn’t happen in any previous class. You’ll just have to take my word on the fact that huge statistical jumps in performance don’t just materialize out of thin air – in fact, the statistics of large numbers dictate strongly against that. Memorizing hundreds of answers doesn’t come even close. I’m completely certain that people were told the specific questions, especially since it was a multi-day format.
I’ve seen systematic cheating involving large numbers of students; it’s completely believable. They think they won’t get punished, and looking over this thread it’s obvious why. A lot of people apparently will attack the person enforcing any standards and won’t assign any responsibility whatsoever to the students.
There is a story, by the way, for the apologists here. There was a puzzle involving the physics GRE exams for many years: virtually all of the highest scores came from China. Yet when those students came here, it turned out that many of them didn’t know much physics.
After extensive investigation, it turned out that the entire university system in China was a cheating engine. They had people go in and take the tests, memorize the questions and answers, and then give them to the professors. They in turn distributed them in class and they had people memorize the answers.
According to the twisted logic in this forum, that’s A-OK. In fact, it really hurt honest people everywhere else in the world (who couldn’t compete with cheaters) and promoted a bunch of unqualified people. So, no, you’re not learning a damn thing by memorizing that the answer to 32 is C.
It only ended when they shut down the exams in China completely, then restarted with a different setup: instead of using a bank of questions, they gave a single test everywhere in the world at the same time and used the questions only once.
This is an exact analog, it was criminal there, and excusing it here is unacceptable.
TomG
I’m getting a kick out of how many people just ASSUME that the test bank is legally available. Look, none of us know for sure what the publisher really intended. I tend to believe banks that are there for teachers are DEFINITELY not supposed to be available to students. That is why a teacher’s edition exists !
I suspect that a few students obtained the test bank illegally and (of course) unethically. For some of you to try to act like these banks are normally studying aids that students can make use of any old time is totally ridiculous.
Now it may be the case that many of the 205 students were not certain of where this study aid came from. However, if the teacher did not tell them to get it and use it, I’d say it is OFF LIMITS no matter how easy it is to find online.
ricky
Wow, it is still going strong.
I think this professor should be proud his students think
having a high grade in his course is worth cheating to obtain. It shows he still has the gift of con.
MattR
@Marc: I am absolutely amazed that this what you think people are arguing. Nobody is arguing that nothing different happened with this test. Nobody is arguing that is impossible for cheating to have occurred. Nobody is saying that it is acceptable to steal the answers you know are going to be on the test. And nobody is saying that memorizing that the answer to question 32 is C helps you to learn anything.
Nylund
I teach economics. We get a mix of students, real “econ” students, students from the business school, and the random collection of people taking things like, “fashion business,” or “music business” that require some econ course work. Cheating is rampant across all lines, but especially so amongst the business school kids.
Back when I was an undergrad, I was a “real econ” student and the kids in the business school saw my good grades and I regularly turned down offers of up to $500 to write papers for them. I never had that happen until I started taking classes with MBA students.
Don
I think it’s cheating, but I am comfortable drawing lines about just how awful something is. I will call the person who steals a computer from their employer “worse” than someone who steals a pen. And some forms of cheating get me more morally enraged than others.
Consider a thought experiment: a student who doesn’t need to sleep – and therefor has 50% more time than everyone else – videotapes every class. Before the exam she sits down and watches the tape, creating a flash card for every single fact or concept the professor mentions. She then goes through the textbook and does the same. She then uses the deck to study for the exams.
Is that cheating?
She gives the deck to a fellow student. That student didn’t make the deck himself. Does using this created list of every concept and fact constitute cheating?
If the publisher creates such a deck and only provides it to the professor, but a student gets her hands on it and uses it to study, is that cheating?
My personal inclination is that in that thought experiment the answer is no, it is not cheating. I don’t think it’s the best way to learn the material but I don’t think it’s an unfair way to approach the task of passing the test. It’s an inherent weakness in this style of testing but I don’t think we can condemn students for attempting to attain the best grade possible.
Obviously (well, I think obviously) the test bank is smaller than the complete list of every concept covered in the class, but in comment 19 MikeJ says there were 700 possible questions and 55 were used.
That’s not an insignificant quantity of things to memorize, and if these really are well-written questions that have been vetted to determine whether they accurately test knowledge (yay statistics) then they shouldn’t be things that are so trivial to memorize that someone who has made no other effort to learn the material can commit them to memory and barf them up on an exam.
At some point I think any reasonable person would say that answer to every possible question no longer provides any real advantage. Maybe 700 isn’t that number but I’d bet 7000 would be. I think 700 is sufficiently large that having those questions isn’t a slam-dunk shortcut to a perfect test score, it’s an advantage.
Yes, it’s a sleazy advantage. Yes, it’s unfair to the students who don’t have access to it. No, I don’t think it’s okay. But I also don’t think it compares, as an advantage or as a moral failing, to getting a copy of the exact test key ahead of time.
If I was that professor I wouldn’t retest. Someone might have given themselves an unfair leg-up with that test bank but you simply cannot fake your way into a passing grade that way unless you have other knowledge of the subject. Those 200 students managed to get a grade letter higher on the exam than they would have otherwise. Why totally throw out a result for the honest 2/3 because 1/3 did marginally better?
I concur with the earlier commenter that said the smarter thing to do here was more tests to dilute the impact of this anomaly. And quit using test banks.
MNPundit
The honest students should probably beat up the cheaters. As for the cheaters, well live by the sword, die by the sword right?