[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. :)