No, I really don't think this is actually cheating. He handed out a test that, while claiming to be original, was actually from a standard bank provided by the publisher. This isn't a SAT or GRE that is standardized by an organization or the U, it is a test in a class that he claimed to be the author of.

What really annoys me about this story is he is covering his laziness / inattentiveness to his class of paying people and having "fun" doing mathematical analysis of his class to prove "cheating" instead of spending time creating a test. If he won't even put effort into original tests what effort does he really put into the class? Are all his class lectures equally canned? Would these students be better off with a video lecture series from the publisher and taking an online test? What value and insights is he bringing to the lectures. He sure isn't testing on those insights.

I will agree with you. I'm not familiar with these test banks, but if they are publicly accessible, what's the point in banning them? Here in Greece, all our university teachers encourage us studying any material we can find, even past exam papers, and most provide the papers themselves. We are also allowed to take the exam paper with us when we finish the examination.

If you're a teacher, it's part of your job to write novel test questions. If you can't be bothered to do that, you can't tell people "this is what I'm going to ask in the exam, but don't read it". This isn't even the minimum amount of effort to keep honest students honest.

As another poster said, studying an entire test bank is studying the material.

We both agree that the professor should have made his own questions. However, this does not get the students off the hook. They used a resource where the publisher clearly says: students, do not use this to study. So, this is clearly, without a doubt cheating. I'm sure that many students knew the professor would use the questions verbatim, making it even moreso questionable.

What if someone came up to you and said "here's a test bank man, the prof pulls the questions right off it!" Clearly it is unethical to study from these materials. Similarly, if the test bank merely says "STUDENTS: Do not use this to study" then it is also unethical to study from.

Nothing in what you say suggests that the students did not cheat. You say the professor was lazy. That statement in no way contradicts the statement "the students cheated."

To me, the morality of what they did is less interesting than the practical ethics of it. The assessment they gamed by accessing the test bank is meant to provide feedback for how well they are acquiring the material. Getting the answers from the test bank means they were more interested in gaming the system for the credential than they were in feedback about where they need to strengthen their understanding. That suggests to me that they're not really interested in the course material, and I wouldn't be interested in working with any of them in any context which used that material. That's an ethical failure. It could be a failure of the course and the educational system, rather than of the students themselves, but it's a problem, no matter who you assign the blame to.

If you've ever been to business school, then you'll know that most of the students clearly don't give a shit about the course material. I mean what kind of 18 year old kid would care about the pricing of a zero-coupon bond?

For the record, 18yo me would be interested in it. :)

Have you seen how degrees are used in the workplace? If you have then not caring about the material and only on your GPA and getting a degree is a very rational choice. Cheating only makes rational sense when a few letters and numbers are vastly more important than the knowledge that is supposed to be conferred by the degree.

In most large businesses knowing how to make pretty graphs that trend upwards infinitely is far more important than anything taught in business school.

> In my experience, the professor almost always tells students what they can use to study from.

No one have any say (if they have, they shouldn't) in what a student chooses to study. The student might choose to study from some cliff notes, class notes, books or test banks.

The professors, at best, can make a suggestion/recommendation which the student is free to ignore, because hell, he is willing to bear the outcome. It's his test scores that are going to be affected.

If the professor recommends a sub-par C book and I prefer K&R, no one can stop me from doing that. Similarly, if the professor suggests "Computer Architecture(Hayes)", and I think the book is a bit tough for me or I am not that interested in studying Computer Architecture, I will go ahead and use cliff notes or solve some test banks. A professor can't shove something down my throat just because he feels otherwise.

I don't really see why the professor is entitled to tell students what to read, or more importantly what not to read.

I agree with you, philosophically. But the issue is that if a professor or other relevant authority says "you cannot use X to study" and you DO use X, then you are definitely very clearly cheating. In this case, test banks are clearly labeled that they are not to be used for students.

What if the professor says not to review past exams, because he may use questions from them. You still say it would be okay to use past exams to study? Well this is similar - the test bank says: students, do not use this to study. Obviously the teacher should have made up his own questions, but the students definitely knew better ...

Isn't the whole point of schooling to know what's on the test? I mean if it was important to be able to do something with the knowledge then they'd focus on that instead of endless tests.

If a professor tells you to not do X and you do X you're very clearly not doing what he says, whether that is 'cheating' who knows. A degree is largely a check mark on a check box for a perfect little life of doing what you're told. Now, if people think that having a degree means X then they are free to do that and will reap the consequences.

Honestly, why should the students bother to come up with original work when the professor can't even be bothered to create original tests? Why is it not 'cheating' for the professor to use another persons test?

Obviously, what's on the test was taught in the class, so why not use an abridged format of the information that makes it unnecessary to learn information not relevant to the course? The test is the subset of the information taught that is relevant to the conferrance of a degree. To know more is to waste your time.

>> Isn't the whole point of schooling to know what's on the test? ... To know more is to waste your time.

In other words, you should do the bare minimum to get by. Well, everyone's motivation for getting a degree is different, and you are welcome to this opinion. However, if this is also your life philosophy, then I think you may be disappointed.

Now, I personally agree that this instructor was lazy. However, in a perfect world actually every single iteration of a class would use the exact same exam. This ensures that every student who ever takes the class is graded in the same way. However, some students retake the class and share exams, so this is not possible.

It's like if you're a magician and you have an awesome magic show. Why make up a new show for each new audience? If the audience is different each time, then your show is still awesome - even if it doesn't change.

If the students consider this material useful to study, it's unethical for a professor to deny them access to it. Making the knowledge harder to acquire is precisely the opposite of his job. Especially when the only reason is that the professor wants to be excused from doing the other part of his job by simply recycling an old test.

@Downvoter So you are basically saying the student doesn't have the right to decide what to read and what not to read? Since he enrolled in the university, he forfeited his intellectual independence and is bound by the whims of a professor?

What I suspect is that half of the questions on the test came from the test bank, and half were original to the professor. Therefore, the cheaters can be detected as ones who got the first half nearly 100% correct, and the second half maybe 50% correct.

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."

I think he was bluffing... but it obviously worked.

Some other threads (and news articles) mention a video clip in which the professor claims he will write the test himself. By doing so, this professor implicitly declared the test bank (and everything else on the Internet) fair game for studying from.

The students probably messed up big time by not reporting that the test was publicly available first, but I think we're missing some important facts and only seeing one man's edited version of events here.

That does not implicitly declare that a test bank is okay to study from, since it says on it that it is not for students. Any student would question to themselves whether they should use it. So ethically speaking:

1) Ask the professor before the exam if it is okay to use the test bank. He will say, of course not! Why do you have it anyway, it's not made available to students - are you trying to cheat?!

2) Astonished that the test bank was the exam verbatim (though I'm sure few students were), students should have told the professor that many students used the test bank, not realizing he would pull the questions directly from it. Of course, no one would do this directly since students aren't supposed to have the test bank in the first place ...

1) Many of the students probably received the test from their peers and did not know that it had come from a private test bank. I seriously doubt 200 people independently and individually broke into the same test bank, unless it was actually open to students, in which case it was as much fair game as the rest of the Internet. There are plenty of universities that keep student-accessible test banks and records of old exams (including the two I've attended), so many students probably assumed it was from that type of source.

1.5) Also note that the concept of a "test bank" that is supposedly inaccessible to students is not entirely common knowledge. We don't know how easily accessible and/or clearly warned this information was.

2) I already said that the students were wrong not to mention that they'd seen the test.