|
Wow, just wow. I never studied in college in the US, and I'm horrified that this is the standard. In Israel, we had the previous tests in the library, and the student union created a (for-sale) curated versions, all above board and perfectly condoned. The assumption was that memorizing the entire test-bank, containing hundreds of questions, was harder than actually understanding the material -- but that if you thought that was your best way to pass the test, go ahead and do that. In fact, some professors explicitly encouraged memorizing proofs for all important theorems by promising that the test will contain at least one or two of them. Of course, usually they followed this by explaining that you're free to come up with your own proof, or memorize key points and manage to interpolate. I would recite proofs in the shower, to myself, every morning. It would only be cheating if you got the actual test being used ahead of time (or, of course, consulted a confederate or disallowed materials during the test). It would not be cheating, and in fact, tolerated explicitly, to harass the professor by asking questions from test banks that you failed to solve, and getting valuable information that way ("it's not going to be on the exam, don't worry about it"). The professors assumed that anyone who puts that much energy into studying for the test deserved the grades they got. tl;dr: In Israel, only stealing the tests or breaking rules during test periods was frowned upon: anything else was viewed as "studying really hard." |