
Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess - nano81
http://thoughtcatalog.com/2010/over-200-students-admit-to-cheating-on-test-after-professor-dedicates-lecture-to-proving-he-knows-they-cheated/
======
gojomo
But was it really cheating? Some students have pointed out that the professor
said repeatedly that he composed the tests himself. Given that, then
plausibly, using example tests from other sources would be a legitimate
preparation method. (For example, the SAT doesn't penalize people for
reviewing lots of practice tests, because it's assumed the actual questions
during a real test will be novel.)

See:

[http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/21485811928/200-st...](http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/21485811928/200-students-
admit-to-cheating-exam-bigger-question-is-if-it-was-really-cheating-
studying.shtml)

Now, it was probably common knowledge from prior semesters that this
professor's exams were from the standard test bank. So those reviewing test
bank questions may not have had pure motives in their study strategy. But it
makes it less cut-and-dried, especially given that the students may have
memorized (for example) 5 answers to potential questions for every 1 that
happened to appear on the test. At some point, knowing all the answers to all
potential questions _is_ knowing the material... or else the whole idea of
formulaic tests is bankrupt.

~~~
psyklic
Yes, it is really cheating. A publisher's test bank is very clearly not made
for students to study from. The publishers warn students not to read them and
try to make them inaccessible. In my experience, the professor almost always
tells students what they can use to study from. Whether students can use past
exams is almost always clarified - I wonder if a student asked in this case.

However, here the instructor has no way of knowing who cheated. He clearly
made a mistake, knowing that using a test bank would make it easy to cheat.
So, he should either let all the grades stand or he should point out the
statistical anomaly and just make everyone take a new exam, which he did. I
can't possibly see how students who didn't confess will be found out,
especially if the exam was multiple choice!

~~~
protomyth
No, I really don't think this is actually cheating. He handed out a test that,
while claiming to be original, was actually from a standard bank provided by
the publisher. This isn't a SAT or GRE that is standardized by an organization
or the U, it is a test in a class that he claimed to be the author of.

What really annoys me about this story is he is covering his laziness /
inattentiveness to his class of paying people and having "fun" doing
mathematical analysis of his class to prove "cheating" instead of spending
time creating a test. If he won't even put effort into original tests what
effort does he really put into the class? Are all his class lectures equally
canned? Would these students be better off with a video lecture series from
the publisher and taking an online test? What value and insights is he
bringing to the lectures. He sure isn't testing on those insights.

~~~
StavrosK
I will agree with you. I'm not familiar with these test banks, but if they are
publicly accessible, what's the point in banning them? Here in Greece, all our
university teachers encourage us studying any material we can find, even past
exam papers, and most provide the papers themselves. We are also allowed to
take the exam paper with us when we finish the examination.

If you're a teacher, it's part of your job to write novel test questions. If
you can't be bothered to do that, you can't tell people "this is what I'm
going to ask in the exam, but don't read it". This isn't even the minimum
amount of effort to keep honest students honest.

As another poster said, studying an entire test bank _is_ studying the
material.

------
RiderOfGiraffes
Previous submissions of the same story from various sources. They all have
some discussion:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1919562>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922049>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922243> <\- This has the most comments

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923931>

------
holdenc
What the professor knows:

\- Some students had an advance copy of the test

\- The grade distribution indicates cheating

What the professor doesn't know:

\- Who cheated

Unless the university has access to a students network traffic proving they
had access to the test, there's no way to be sure who cheated. The fact that
the professor trudges through threats and vagaries for a full 15 minutes only
seems to underscore this.

~~~
bdonlan
On the contrary - there's a few things they can do. They could examine the
difference in results between the two tests at the individual-student level,
for example. Or, using the set of students who admit to their cheating as a
training set, do a question-level analysis.

~~~
PostOnce
Doesn't prove anything. Sometimes you don't get enough sleep and do poorly on
a test. Sometimes you just have a great day. Using statistics as though they
are hard facts and not merely suggestions of likelihood is a terrible idea
when there is a question of guilt or innocence.

I have in the past had wildly fluctuating grades. Don't believe everything
your powerpoint-prettied software stats tell you.

~~~
3pt14159
Does it 100% prove it? No. But what he can easily do is call up the top 200
most suspected students, get them to sit down in an office with nothing but a
calculator and a pen and give them a very small subset of the original
questions with the numbers changed. 20 people might be able to get them right,
but a good 50 people arn't going to know where to start for any of the
questions. Then all of a sudden it is "oh shit" time. If I were one of the
"cheating" students I would come forward too.

This actually happened when I was studying engineering at Waterloo. The course
was calculus 3 and the prof, who normally taught math majors, didn't know that
there was a _university commissioned_ exam bank with previous exams for
courses. Course coverage was sporadic for all but final exams, so we normally
didn't check it, but the previous midterm was actually there. One of us found
it 24 hours before the midterm, so half of us got it and half of us didn't.
The prof had reused the hardest question. Long story short, nobody got in
trouble, but the prof made it so your top and bottom "midterm" (there were 5
of them before the final) could be optional dropped together or not at all.

------
jsolson
So, at least where I went to school (Georgia Tech) it is well known and
accepted that students have word of basically every question that's ever been
asked for any given course. Professors also commonly post previous exams as
study guides for courses.

Is this not common elsewhere?

~~~
riffraff
in all the universities I've seen in italy you always have access to the
previous written exam tests for preparation. For the oral part, when teachers
have repetitive behavior, I've often see people collect datasets and use them
for studying.

But the case seem different: the teacher in question actually took the tests
from a given set and this set was known in advance. This is silly of the
teacher, not of the students.

------
dschobel
You have to think that if the professor really could identify the culprits
he'd be limiting the retakes to them.

Maybe the real test here is for the students to realize that there is no
"forensic analysis" in the world which could identify a cheater with 100%
confidence except for the confession he is trying to bully out of them.

~~~
sesqu
Of course, the test of confession doesn't have 100% confidence either. See for
example the Innocence Project's page on this:

[http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/False-
Confessions...](http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/False-
Confessions.php)

------
ajays
The solution, of course, is to have open-book, open-notes tests. Let the
students bring any notes, books, etc.; anything but a communication device.
The questions need to be novel and challenging enough so that the students who
understand the material can walk out in no time; the students who don't, can
sit around flipping through their notes.

Of course, this approach requires the _professor_ to do a lot more work. (The
few times I taught, I used this approach and always got rave or begrudging
reviews).

So really, I have no sympathy for this professor if he adopted the "security
through obscurity" approach (as in, the problem set wouldn't be accessible to
students). I don't blame the students for doing what they did; in real life,
don't we expect employees to use whatever resources they can to solve
problems?

~~~
luker
Exactly. The best professor I ever had did exactly this and he was from India
and dressed like a cowboy (not important but awesome). He posted a few
previous semester's tests online. And he allowed us to bring whatever
assignments, reference manuals, etc. (except for computers) into every test,
but wrote a brand new test. I think this sort of thinking came about because
he was just the kind of teacher that really cared that his students wanted to
learn and it showed in the lab assignments and when he was actually giving
lecture. This is when you know what learning is really about and you stop
worrying about grades.

------
kleinmatic
I might have missed something in the video, but if I were an innocent student,
the benefit for me in falsely claiming I cheated far outweighs the risk in
defending my innocence.

The choices as I see them are these, whether you're innocent or not: 1) say
that you cheated, and you get to retake the test as though you never took it
the first time -- you don't even fail the test! -- but you never get to ask
this professor of a lecture with 600 students for a favor. 2) don't admit that
you cheated, get caught in some dragnet based on pretty flawed statistical
reasoning (or better yet, a witch-hunt), and "not graduate." 3) Best case
scenario: You say nothing, don't get accused of anything, and you get the
undying loyalty of the professor, though that loyalty fails at the first try,
because it doesn't extend to you getting out of a test you by definition
shouldn't have to take in the first place.

I'm a bit stunned that only 200 students "confessed."

~~~
Aron
An additional penalty for confessing was having to take a 4 hour ethics
course.

------
srean
I don't think it is really possible to keep a question bank secret. Some
students tend to follow up with those who had taken the course last time, at
least in my university. So if the question bank is _voluminous_ _enough_ , why
not just make it open ?

Whats the worst that can happen, people might go through it and learn all the
solutions. Well, let them, that's the purpose of the course anyways. But the
question bank cant so small that it does not explore the full diversity of
problems. And no one is claiming that all questions will be from the question-
bank, throw in a few off question-bank odd-balls each year.

But how could they analyze the submissions to figure out (even approximately)
who cheated who did not ? Apart from trawling their email and phone calls and
wire taps that is....:-) I suspect part of the "forensics" was a bluff.

I can only guess that there are a few problems in the set that historically
have a low probability of being solved correctly. So whoever solved those can
be marked suspicious. But a test will have only a few of those.

But it sure sucks to be in a course where the instructor is unaware of the
problem that QB is available and you are unwilling to look up the QB.
Particularly where the QB was particularly designed for the top percentile.

~~~
bhickey
> I suspect part of the "forensics" was a bluff.

I agree. It sounds an awful lot like a bluff.

While in college I worked as a teaching assistant, on a few occasions me and
my staff identified cheaters.

No one ever got caught by getting the right answer. Cheaters got caught when
they had mistakes in common.

------
gsivil
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923931>

was posted just yesterday

~~~
nano81
Thanks - didn't see that

------
Hoff
Your job as a teacher or as a presenter is to extend the available materials,
and to provide me with insights that I might not gain from Googling existing
materials.

Not to prevent me from accessing the available materials.

Not to control access to information.

If what I am learning from your teachings and from your tests and from other
students can be entirely replaced by Googling through test banks, then you're
not helping me advance.

If a presenter is reading off the slides?

If you're not utilizing what is available, whether Google or Khan Academy or
iTunes classes or otherwise, you're not helping me make connections. To think.
To research.

We see similar transitions arising in many human pursuits. In journalism.
Booking travel. Financial markets. Programming. Music. And education. And in
an earlier era of teaching, simply bringing calculators to a test.

Don't make me memorize. Make me think. Make me research.

It appears the professor has unwittingly also proved his teaching approach has
failed.

~~~
jeff95350
"Your job as a teacher or as a presenter is to extend the available materials"

I'm puzzled by this. Let's say you teach basic physics or algebra... how are
you supposed to "extend" the material, particularly testing material?

I always thought the benefits of having a teacher were: 1\. Human contact 2\.
Ability to answer arbitrary questions in an instant 3\. Ability to adapt
lectures to the audience 4\. Students in the presence of a room full of other
people trying to learn the same thing at the same time

Those would all be great benefits even if the tests were all the same,
administered in a standardized way, nationwide, by third-party proctors with
third-party graders.

That's not to say that there's anything wrong with independent study, online
courses, or ad-hoc groups of students learning together.

I just take issue with the idea that a teacher, in order to do their job, must
also compose novel tests every year as though the new tests would somehow be
better than all the other tests used over the years. If teaching honest
students, it just doesn't sound like an efficient use of teaching resources to
re-invent the wheel each time.

And there are objective benefits to using the same or similar tests from year
to year. One is that you can see if your class is improving or lagging in
specific areas compared with previous classes. That could help you hone your
teaching over the years. Wow, I tried playing this game to illustrate
economics, and these students scored way higher on the arbitrage questions
than the previous 5 years! Or: "gee, I thought that group project might be
good, but the test scores dropped this year".

~~~
Hoff
Thinking like the instructor/presenter/seller quite clearly, though also
remember to think like the student/purchaser, too.

You're clearly familiar with running the process line and incremental
improvements for yourself and optimizing your work, but are you equally
comfortable being the widget that's being processed within the assembly line,
and whether the widget is getting the best value?

My trip down that educational assembly line was seriously and mind-numbingly
unpleasant, and I can only imagine what it's like with all of the current
standardized-tests model. Looking back, what we were taught and what we
learned for those tests was sufficiently ridiculous and, well, wasteful. We
didn't learn that most of what we learned would be outmoded, that the tools we
were taught would be gone, and that memorization was far less practical than
learning how to research.

As a presenter, I don't want to repeat that for the folks I am teaching.
Though thankfully, I don't have to teach to standardized tests.

As an instructor, you're selling a service. Are your students buying?

~~~
jeff95350
"are you equally comfortable being the widget that's being processed within
the assembly line, and whether the widget is getting the best value?"

A valid point. There are many ways of learning though, and if you want
instruction and materials personalized to you, those are available -- albeit
at a much higher cost. And there are other, self-directed methods of learning
that are a much lower cost than either method (e.g., going to a library, doing
research online, etc.). [Aside: who pays the cost is a separate issue, but
someone must pay it.]

Given that society is constrained by scarce resources, I think that re-using
tests is a perfectly reasonable allocation of resources for many teaching
situations. Other materials are re-used regularly, such as textbooks, and
there's nothing personal about that. Would you say that using the same
textbook as someone else turns you into a "widget"?

It's unfortunate that your educational experience was so unpleasant. My K-12
experience seemed quite wasteful as well. But I think that has more to do with
incompetence and laziness. Doing more personalized teaching requires more
teachers, which means they will have an even harder time attracting enough
quality talent, and an even harder time firing bad teachers. That doesn't
sound like a net win on quality to me, even if it is more personalized.

------
xentronium
Scaring shit out of you since 1981.

While it is generally true that good students should not cheat, but using
questions from standard question bank was somewhat asking for it :)

Nice and simple trick with distribution and disturbances, though.

------
rsobers
This is definitely cheating, but there's an important lesson for the
professor: if you care about cheating, don't be lazy. Write your own exam
questions and change them often.

You can tell that this is the most exciting event in this professor's life in
the past 20 years. Maybe he should try varying his material.

------
kapitalx
The students actually were asked to confess if they had seen the sample test
before the example or not. They weren't confessing to actual cheating.

------
pmorici
This guy seems like a crappy prof to me. He essentially got caught taking the
lazy way out and is now acting surprised and trying to blame the students.

------
brisance
Outside of the United States, there are test standards called the GC(S)E "A"
and "O" levels which are roughly equivalent to entrance exams for
college/senior high respectively. Because these exams have been going on for
DECADES, the examining body has basically given up on guarding these questions
i.e. they are regarded to be in the "public domain". Enterprising publishers
have called these collections of questions the "10 year series", which are
exam questions from the previous decade. There is not a single person in this
part of the world who does not own a copy when preparing for those exams.

------
julius_geezer
A close relative teaches in a continuing-ed masters program. The first two or
three times she taught the class, the grades on the midterm were OK, but
reasonably distributed. This fall, they were uniformly excellent. She
concluded that the students had copies of her exams from previous semesters,
and rewrote the final.

As far as I know, it never occurred to her to tell the students off. Of
course, these are twenty-somethings and probably a lot less susceptible to
brow-beating.

------
jtchang
I use to have a professor that actively encouraged us to review old tests,
question banks, friends, anything we could get our hands on. Hell his tests
were even open book/notes.

The tests were genuinely difficult. You could pass by looking at the material
because some of the questions were just lecture examples with numbers changed.
But to really ace the test you needed understanding of the material.

------
delinquentme
Im sorry but this is the education system FAILING its students. 1\. fear
mongering by the prof " FORENSICE ANALYSIS" and "LEGAL ACTION" 2\. the SAME
test for the last FIVE years? 3\. some crap sob story about "what were the
last 20 years about" ... how about you being a lazy ass professor?

------
ltjohnson
I'm a 5th year PhD student who is teaching a large (80 student) section of a
course, this is the 4th course I've taught. I've also taken plenty of exams as
a student, and they are still fresh in mind.

I would want to know more information before I decided the students were
cheating or not. The instructor refereed to an "exam room", and gave an hour
range that the new exam could be taken. So the students are not all taking the
exam at the same time, this makes it seem possible that the exam is online. If
the exam is online, and the students can take it at home vs take it in a
proctored room, that would change what would be cheating. If it were online at
home (I don't think so from the video) then reviewing the test bank while
taking the exam would be cheating. If not, then having seen a question before
the exam may or may not be cheating, depending on HOW you saw the question.

If you did not acquire questions in an unethical way, then it's not cheating,
it's just studying. As an instructor, I will sometimes put problems from the
book onto my exam. If the students worked the problems before because they
were studying hard, then good for them! I want my students to study, because
it will help them learn. I also provide a sample exam with previous exam
questions on it; I write most of my own questions and it's important for
students to get used to my style. As a student, I had to take a written exam
for my PhD. When I was studying for the exam I asked Professors for help, one
of my Professors gave me some of his questions. I worked out every single
question. He also submitted one of his existing questions to the exam and I
recognized it when I was taking the exam. Cheating? No. I just got lucky (and
worked my ass off).

If test questions are acquired by malicious means, or knowing that they are
going to be on the exam, or are the test bank that is going to be used to make
the exam. Then it is cheating. So if students knew that the questions came
from a test bank, and downloaded the test bank (I'm sure it's on the web
somewhere) to gain an advantage they cheated.

Finally, as an instructor. Writing a decent exam is surprisingly hard. My goal
with an exam is two-fold, figure out how well the class as a whole is doing,
and separate the students into their grade groups. The ideal exam has some
problems that even the D students can answer (to separate them from the F's)
and some problems (usually just 1 problem) that are a stretch for the A
students. And a mix of medium problems for everyone. If you have too many easy
problems, the grades will creep up and you won't separate students. If you
have too many hard problems, the grades will creep down and you won't separate
students. Writing an exam from scratch is very time consuming. I use my
private test bank, and try to add 1 or 2 new questions to the bank when I'm
writing each exam. I can understand (but don't agree with) an instructor
pulling entirely from an existing bank to write an exam.

~~~
sequoia
"Writing a decent exam is surprisingly hard."

I hope I don't come off as flippant, but you're shooting for a PhD, the most
advanced degree you can hold (if I'm not mistaken); isn't "surprisingly hard"
kind of the name of the game? I'm sure if you ask students, many of them would
say taking the test is "surprisingly hard," are shortcuts justified for them
too? I'm sure a building contractor will tell you keeping track of and in
compliance with environmental and safety regulations is hard, but we expect
them to do it nonetheless, because that's his/her job!

Ultimately, whichever method allows the instructor to most effectively perform
his or her job is best, and maybe that's question banks. Cases like this one
are notable because they call into question the stance that using banks is as
effective/more efficient.

Good luck on your degree!

~~~
ltjohnson
I'm not interpreting your comment as flippant. :)

In terms of shortcuts, that would depend on what they were. Some are fine,
others are not. E.g. 'borrowing' answers from other students on homework is a
shortcut, but it's okay if the student understands the material in the end;
cheating on an exam is not an okay shortcut.

"Surprisingly hard" is the name of the game. I mentioned that writing exams is
hard to motivate why an instructor would use a test bank. At a research school
(I'm at a research focused school), being an instructor is only a small part
of a professors (or grad students) job. Using a test bank (from
books/publishers or private ones) is considered to be fine, as it lets them
focus more time on the things they "should" be doing. Many things that are
considered okay in this context are abhorred in others, e.g. having grad
students be primary instructors is okay here but would be taboo at a teaching
focused school. Of course, most teaching focused schools don't have big grad
programs.

Incidentally, I'm on track to graduate this year. I'm sending out academic job
applications and I find myself more drawn to teaching schools than I thought
I'd be.

------
meeee
At my university usually all tests are published by the institutes themself on
the iternet. They even advice you to train with the old exams. Some of them
are also open book. But every exam is individual and so different (not only
numbers changed) that you really have to train all the stuff to get a positive
mark. Relying on "secret" question caches or buying questions from a third
party is not very smart, lazy and really makes no sense to me. They did´nt
cracked the system, they only used it for their belongings.

------
moo
Students repeat courses, audit courses. Students can be exposed to these
canned test questions in this way. Universities push the general learning
experience in selling their education product. Those who want to make the
student the commodity and control how they learn for better quality control
strike me as dyed in the wool bureaucrats.

------
cool-RR
What a petty man.

~~~
AndyKelley
"The days of finding a new way to cheat the system are over."

He's full of crap! He doesn't do any attempt at proving at all. He merely
keeps threatening and intimidating, and the only thing he knows is that the
numbers are suspicious.

------
icco
This disgusts me, but I totally believe it, as a college student seeing these
kinds of numbers do not surprise me at all.

Where I go to school though, the test is given at one hour on one day. The
whole you have 52 hours to take the test thing. It seems like whoever takes it
first could still help others study.

------
johnglasgow
After being so upset with his cheating class, why does the professor offer a
large time period to re-take the test? It seems like he is baiting the
students to cheat again. Can't he set it during a normal class period where
everyone takes it at once?

------
ccomputinggeek
For most courses the exams don't stray far from what's already been asked
before. Competition between universities has made this problem a lot worse.
Students choose courses with high pass rates and favorable grade ratios.

------
matthodan
The prof's home page states: "Important Note: I have chosen not to participate
in any social networking environments." <http://www.bus.ucf.edu/rquinn/>

------
reason
The entire education system is essentially one big game, from the obscure
admissions process to professors sticking to predetermined grading
distributions; and these students are simply playing along.

------
matthodan
It was probably more work to memorize the test bank than to study the material
as normal... It's ironic that those who memorized the test bank probably know
the material best.

------
runningdogx
Here's the video of a part of the first lecture in which he claims he writes
the test questions:

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pJG7aCQtI8E>

Based on that, I think a reasonable student would conclude that even if a
publisher's test bank is not supposed to be accessible to students, using that
test bank would not constitute cheating. Since the prof wasn't forthright in
stating that he would use the publisher's test bank, he has no right to
complain that students used it to study.

------
miurajose
Those who cheated because they did not know the material will not do as well
on the makeup. That is one way of finding out who cheated.

~~~
bytesong
By your logic, those who did well on the original exam but could not do as
well on the makeup because they happened to have a bad mood/health/etc. will
also be qualified as cheaters.

How does that make sense?

------
CallMeV
I just wish I could plusvote this one twice.

------
sequoia
"The consequences will never be the same!" ;)

------
ghshephard
Dupe.

~~~
ugh
That’s how you do that: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1926525>

~~~
gsivil
can you please explain that for future use?

~~~
ugh
Referencing past submissions about the same topic, whether they are exactly
the same or merely similar is very useful, especially if those past
submissions contain discussions.

You should always link to those past submissions and remain otherwise neutral
(or positive if you like). It is not and cannot be the submitters duty to
closely track Hacker News for all stories that have been submitted in the past
[0]. Duplicates are inevitable, just writing “dupe” helps no one. Be
constructive!

[0] I’m not entirely sure whether the submitter should check the front page
before submitting. Since a bookmarklet is officially endorsed and prominently
linked I would rather think that checking the front page is no requirement.
You should maybe only be careful and check the front page or the new page when
you want to submit a story about an event that you know will be a hot topic on
Hacker News (say, a Google press conference).

~~~
gsivil
As a new member in Hacker News I have thought of this problem a bit. I would
like to know the opinion of the community. There are some pearls on the
internet that even though can be old and maybe posted before(some months or
years ago) they can be useful, interesting and even rekindle discussions where
new ideas can be introduced. At the same time posting something that was
discussed one two days ago and attracted attention(as you have pointed- I am
not talking about the specific topic but in general) should be maybe linked to
be fair with the original uploaders.

And I agree that it is good practice at least to check at least the first page
of Hacker News or the "news" section to avoid obvious duplicates .

