I recently caught wind of this video showing a professor scolding nearly 200 students for “cheating” on a university midterm. The problem is, after watching the video, is that I fail to see how this is cheating at all.
What appears to have happened is that the university professor, most likely out of laziness in my opinion, generated a midterm exam using a test bank, which is a database of test questions. Since it is likely that these questions were also on many of the previous year’s midterm exams, students that studied from old material had a distinct advantage over students who hadn’t studied from that material.
The problem is that many students use previous test material as a way to study. I know personally the way I prepared for any midterm and final exam was to attempt to solve and answer every question I could get my hands on – that way I was reasonably prepared to answer any question that came up.
Learning is a one-way process. Unless you’re afflicted with some type of memory loss, you generally can’t “unlearn” material you’ve already encountered. So when presented with questions you’ve encountered before, what do you do? Purposefully get them wrong, or pat yourself on the back for studying more material than some of your peers?
At the University of British Columbia not only do students often study from previous exams, but the associated student clubs also make money off of selling previous exams to students in study packs. So not only is this an accepted practice, but it’s encouraged by the student clubs.
I actually just sent an email to the professor in that video expressing my disagreement with how he portrayed those students. The question I posed to him was the following. Since the same course material is taught by different professors, how are students supposed to reasonably remove the obvious bias that comes from different professors testing course material by generating their own unique questions for the exam? It’s simple – you study previous exams given by the same professor to get a feel for how each professor tests the knowledge for that class.
In my opinion, these students are being vilified because they studied from previous exam material and the professor was too lazy to come up with his own test. That’s the bottom line. If I were the students in that class I would protest to the administration and the dean. If a professor getting paid six figures can’t spend a bit of time putting together a unique test for his class, he shouldn’t blame the students for when they ace it due to having studied from previous tests.
Holy shit. Totally agree. That’s complete bullshit, and lambasting student for reasonably and smartly using past tests as an indicator for material to know for this class is just common sense.
Ridiculous.
When I watched the video, my impression is not that students studied from previous exams or from material available from the same test bank, but that someone got a hold of the EXACT TEST that the prof had generated from the bank and made that available to students in the course. Presumably students have been using test-bank resources and older tests for some time, but this was the first occasion where a whole test was compromised.
Most likely, that’s the only way (other than if the prof simply reused a previous available test with no changes) the results could have been skewed as much as they were, since if students were studying previous tests, or samples from the bank, they wouldn’t have known all the questions or the answers to them.
If indeed the available test was the exact one the prof was giving, and students knew it, they were cheating, and it is their responsibility not to do so knowingly. But the prof also learned a lesson: instructors aren’t the only people with access to test banks, so they suck because they are prone to skewing test results rather that evaluating what students actually know.
When I watched the video, my impression is not that students studied from previous exams or from material available from the same test bank, but that someone got a hold of the EXACT TEST that the prof had generated from the bank and made that available to students in the course. Presumably students have been using test-bank resources and older tests for some time, but this was the first occasion where a whole test was compromised.
Most likely, that’s the only way (other than if the prof simply reused a previous available test with no changes) the results could have been skewed as much as they were, since if students were studying previous tests, or samples from the bank, they wouldn’t have known all the questions or the answers to them.
If indeed the available test was the exact one the prof was giving, and students knew it, they were cheating, and it is their responsibility not to do so knowingly. But the prof also learned a lesson: instructors aren’t the only people with access to test banks, so they suck because they are prone to skewing test results rather that evaluating what students actually know.
That wasn’t my take on it, but it’s hard to tell. From his statistics as well I’d be surprised if that was the case. It was two gaussian distributions on top of each other. I would think if people had the exact test there would be far more scores near the top.
Even if they had the exact test but acquired it through normal means (from a previous year’s exam), I don’t consider that cheating – the prof should have made a new test. If someone broke in and stole this year’s current test, and it wasn’t based on any previous tests, then I would say that is definitely cheating.
That wasn’t my take on it, but it’s hard to tell. From his statistics as well I’d be surprised if that was the case. It was two gaussian distributions on top of each other. I would think if people had the exact test there would be far more scores near the top.
Even if they had the exact test but acquired it through normal means (from a previous year’s exam), I don’t consider that cheating – the prof should have made a new test. If someone broke in and stole this year’s current test, and it wasn’t based on any previous tests, then I would say that is definitely cheating.