This is actually the single biggest problem I've seen in test suites. I'd much prefer to see ugly un-DRY test code than overly engineered test code. The number of times I've had test suites that are passing tests by coincidence is depressingly large and is always due to this sort of behavior. Yes, we're all software devs and we like writing good code, but in tests it's much more important to be able to isolate and verify that the tests are correct than it is to be pretty.