[qwhelan]

One example of an adversarial university environment is how fraternities and sororities keep copies of exams and assignments from prior years. Professors know cheating is rampant, so have to change the questions every semester.

Some courses at Caltech had almost identical exams for at least a decade when I went through. The professors knew cheating like the above simply would not be tolerated by undergrads.

I sat on and helped run the Board of Control, which handled academic honor code violations, for several years and professors who had been at other universities would absolutely rave about how much more they could trust Caltech students. And that was while reporting a suspected cheating case to me.

[barry-cotter]

This honestly sounds ridiculous to me. Every course I ever did we had access to years and years of past papers. Doing past papers is one of the best ways to study. Teaching or learning to the test is a good thing if the test is good.

[qwhelan]

Some professors would provide past exams for study aids or use them as homework problems.

However, the explicit default was that you should not look at solutions from prior years. Professors would announce at the beginning of the course that they reuse questions and looking at prior years solutions was an honor code violation. I think it's pretty clear it's cheating when the expectations are clearly outlined.

If you had inadvertently come across the problem before and independently solved it, you were expected to disclose that as part of your answer. I personally had to do this several times, and never suffered any negative consequences for it, but the expectation for honesty was there.

[shalmanese]

So why not just provide students with officially sanctioned practice papers that are not past papers and also guaranteed to not share questions with the actual exam?

[barry-cotter]

If you write a new exam paper every year that is also guaranteed not to share questions with the actual exam. From a professor’s point of view many questions that are superficially different are similar enough to practically be the same question. There are many, many questions that ask about what the real cause of the French Revolution was, or test to see if you will recognize that this problem is basically a red black tree.

[watwut]

In college where I was at last year exams were public knowledge and anyone had access to them. No one seen it as cheating to try last year exam before going on this year.

Yes, it means teachers have to vary tests, but then again it gives you repository of exercises to learn from and to train on. It is just win for learning.

[qwhelan]

This is an explicit rule introduced at the beginning of most Caltech courses, so the norm is that that behavior is cheating due to being warned in advance.