[electromagnetic]

Why shouldn't a community of students be able to cache and reuse responses to cached and reused questions?

Laziness begets laziness. I don't see how you can claim it's ethical for teachers to forfeit 1/2 of their job to a question cache. Cheating in this definition is using someone else's work to benefit yourself and by definition the teacher cheated too by using someone else's questions to form "his" alleged test. IE benefiting himself by not having to do the actual legwork to write his own test.

I don't think HNers are pro-cheating, I think we're pro-effort. We all work our fucking assess off at things we love, it's a little disrespectful for some shit-ass professor to claim his students are cheating by using HIS method to save time and effort. I call that his students learning a little too much from him.

[dkarl]

Cheating in this definition is using someone else's work to benefit yourself and by definition the teacher cheated too by using someone else's questions to form "his" alleged test.

That is a bizarre definition of cheating and shows that you don't understand the point of testing at all. The point of testing is to measure (perhaps crudely) students' understanding of what they are supposed to learn in the class. The teacher's job is to administer a test that does this effectively, and if a test bank helps him do his job effectively, he should use it. In this case as in so many others, it is perfectly appropriate to use someone else's work as a resource to improve one's own work. In fact, as long as one is honest about attribution, this is highly desired. Test materials are unattributed, and sharing is the assumption, so it isn't dishonest or unprofessional for a teacher to draw from a bank of questions when composing a test.

(Students are claiming that the professor said he created the tests himself, but even if he drew the questions from a test bank, he was still deciding which particular facts and concepts were most important to test. Maybe he said he composed each question himself -- that would be a lie. However, it wouldn't be a lie for him to say he created the tests. It is standard for teachers to compose their own tests but unusual to aim for originality on each question, unless it is an essay test with a small number of questions.)

Why is taking a test different from creating one? If the point of the test was to create a big stack of papers with the right answers on them, it would be appropriate for the students to collaborate and use any resources to accomplish that goal. However, that is not the point. The point is to measure each student's understanding and help decide how much credit each student should be given for their understanding of the material covered by the test.

When students cheat, they subvert the purpose of testing. By hiding their cheating, they dishonestly claim credit for understanding they did not achieve. The professor's job is to administer a test that will test student's understanding. It is not his job to demonstrate his independent powers of test-writing.

[chc]

So is any studying for a test acceptable, since it modifies the understanding you had before studying? I mean, we have to assume the materials being studied will contain the right answers to the questions on the test.

Are lecture notes cheating? The professor is likely to include answers to test questions in his lectures. I've had professors use in their lectures the exact questions — literally, not a word different — that would appear in the next test. Was I cheating by attending the lecture and learning what was taught there?

Where do we draw the line between smart studying and cheating if the professor makes no effort to keep the test questions a secret?

[dkarl]

So is any studying for a test acceptable, since it modifies the understanding you had before studying?

That's the whole freakin' point: the test is supposed to measure your understanding. The honest way to improve your test scores is to improve your understanding of the material. The professors administer tests, the students study and learn, this is the intended way of things. This is the way traditional college classes work, and if you want to go to college and get grades, then you have two choices: study and earn your grades honestly, or lie and cheat.

Everybody encounters a class that they end up cutting corners in, of course. For example, you can try to predict what topics will be on the test and study those most carefully. You can try to predict which problems will be on the test and learn to solve those. The question is, are you actually trying to learn something the class is designed to teach and hoping that what you learn will serve you well in the test, or are you trying to improve your score without learning anything useful? Drilling pattern recognition of potential test problems is not learning. That method relies on your mind's ability to recognize specific verbal patterns and associate them with other verbal patterns. It has nothing to do with understanding the material. From the perspective of learning, it's a complete waste of time.

By the way, I agree with you that professors should lift questions and answers from their lecture notes with great restraint, for exactly the same reason. One or two here and there to reward diligent attendance is fine, but if it's a significant portion of the test, then the professor is essentially conspiring with the students to inflate the test results by relying on familiar phrases or diagrams to trigger students' memories of how to answer a particular question. That's actually a good reason for teachers to share testing materials: will students still understand the material when their professor's particular phrasing is not present? I heard a student complain he got a physics problem wrong because the professor always said "inclined plane," but the test problem talked about a "slanted floor." Clearly the student did not understand the material and was relying on verbal associations; no matter whose fault it was (the student's or the professor's) it was good that the test result reflected the student's lack of understanding. In the real world, an inclined plane does not say to you, "Hi there, I'm an 'inclined plane.' Does that ring a bell?" Or if it does, it will probably not use exactly the same words your college physics professor used in his lectures! That's a very good reason for a professor to use problems written by someone else.

[jimbokun]

"I don't see how you can claim it's ethical for teachers to forfeit 1/2 of their job to a question cache."

Exactly 1/2 of a professor's job is constructing exams? What part goes to lecturing and preparation? Office hours? Grading those exams and class projects?

"Cheating in this definition is using someone else's work to benefit yourself..."

No, cheating is gaining an unfair advantage in some kind of competition by violating the clearly specified rules. Your definition certainly is not how the word cheat is commonly used, and I have no idea where you came up with it.

I think you are thinking of "plagiarism," which sometimes intersects with cheating, sometimes not.

[electromagnetic]

The students are accused of plagiarism by a teacher who is essentially plagiarising test questions. The students are accused of cheating - I contest that the professor is too.

[pohl]

I realize that accusatory turnabout is a fun exercise, but what you have here only meets the form of turnabout, and not the substance. One of the key indicators that you've gone off the rails: your turnabout necessitates conceptual contortions in order to make a false equivalence.

In your post above, you falsely claim that the students are being accused of plagiarism. They are not. While plagiarism can be a kind of academic dishonesty, it is not the particular kind of academic dishonesty at issue here. Then, to complete your false equivalence, you try to re-frame the de rigueur practice of drawing test items from an item bank as plagiarism, which is just laughable and ignores both the purpose of the test instrument and the different roles of student and teacher.

I contest that the professor is too.

The word "contest" in the above context means "to oppose as mistaken or wrong". So your sentence literally reads that you dispute that the teacher is also cheating. Clearly you have been arguing the opposite.

I think it might be time to give it a rest.

[pohl]

Why shouldn't a community of students be able to cache and reuse responses to cached and reused questions?

Call me old fashioned, but the roles of "student" and "instructor" make all the difference here to me. Although I'm not surprised that youngsters these days feel entitled to this behavior. Entitlement runs deep in modern American youth.

Are students entitled to lecture, assign homework, and hand out grades too?

[electromagnetic]

I think entitlement runs deep in American adults who are teaching it to the youth.

You blatantly feel that teachers are entitled to perform with a different ethics set as their students, which is personally abhorrent to me. If you have a problem with students cheating at their job of studying, you have to have a problem with teachers cheating at their job of teaching. It isn't an ambiguous issue, it's rather clear cut. If a student cheats they risk expulsion, however the teacher cheats and there's not even an eyelid batter - I call that a society of entitlement.

[pohl]

I may have missed something. What, exactly, is the ethical violation alleged against the teacher here?

I saw the video made by the students that attempts to "prove" that the teacher said he wrote the test questions himself, but it makes an extremely flimsy case:

1) It's a statement made on Day 1 of class, long before the midterm test

2) He only said that he creates the test, but does not state that he authors the questions. One algorithm for creating a test is to select questions from a question bank, so this statement has no evidential value.

3) The only remaining "evidence" in the video is a statement where he said that "he may write" a question that even he may not be able to answer. It's entirely possible that he intended on Day 1 to author the questions for the midterm, but ended up using the above method for creating the test by the time midterms rolled around.

The students are very eager here to turn the tables here and display some righteous indignation to deflect attention back to the instructor, but they haven't yet managed to make a compelling case.

[jimbokun]

Applying the word "cheating" to the teacher here is a re-definition of words worthy of Humpty Dumpty. The plain meaning of cheating is to gain an unfair advantage over others in a competition. The teacher administering an exam is not a competitive act on the part of the teacher.

I am deeply disappointed that so many here on Hacker News are resorting to such poor sophistry to defend a very simple, cut and dried case of cheating, and that so many are lending their approval through their up-votes.

[electromagnetic]

FYI you don't need to post essentially the same comment twice.

[jimbokun]

Point taken. :)