> He got them [old exams] through his campus Indian student group.

Only shared with fellow Indians?

Yep, it was the official Indian student group registered on campus. Nothing wrong with the association itself, but a large subset of it were Bio majors so I’d imagine that’s how many were involved.

Just FYI, this is far more prevalent than is implied in this thread and not tied to a particular nationality/subgroup of people on college campuses. Established clubs, fraternities, sororities, arts/performing groups, and even niche majors/honors programs all tend to accumulate "academic resources" (i.e. past exams + homework) as members take courses over the years.

Why is studying based on previous years questions cheating. Dont we do the same with white board interviews?

It's not "cheating", per se, but it is unfair.

How does an unaffiliated student get access to those prior year exams? Fortunately, the internet is levelling this somewhat.

When teaching at a college level, I used to go out of my way to provide any historical resources. I want my class to be fair to everyone involved.

I also used to redraft my exams and assignments every single year. This is quite a lot of work and a lot of professors simply won't do it. However, if you don't, then some students will take advantage of it, and your class isn't being fair to everyone.

Since you bring it up, I think studying questions that a company has been known to ask in the past is somewhat in poor taste, especially if the candidate gives the impression that this is the first time they've seen the question. Usually, when I've done interviews, I'll try to throw a wrench into the question and see how the candidate reacts if I suspect they've seen the question before.

Though in both cases, I think it's on the question asker (either teacher or interviewer) to make sure that questions change up frequently enough and aren't easy to study without having genuine understanding.

When interview questions are generally of the ‘have I seen this question before’ kind, it’s hardly cheating to try and memorize as many of them as possible.

It just means the method of interviewing is flawed.

If the instructor says you can't do it then it is cheating.

It's common for professors to not allow students to keep exams for this reason. Students in such classes do a "brain dump" by writing down all the questions they remember immediately after leaving the test to get around this.

Some professors try to go after students who sell their notes for the class.

I remember when I was in college, we had this end of semester exam for stochastic processes. Our exams are usually about 2 hours long and have about 4-5 problems to solve. After this particular exam, a friend of mine was surprised that I hadn't seen the last problem with the answer in our professor's book (she has seen it the night before. Looks like all her friends had too). Ina mathematics exam with 4 problems, I can't exaggerate the relief one would feel if one of the problems is already solved for you. Not sure how often this happens, but it seems like it's quite common. I was in a special scholar's group. I was more into going to the library, exploring related theorems and stuff while except for a handful of others, most my peers were just doing past papers and practice questions for the exam. I did okay, but I felt like trying to learn more and explore things in university was a liability as far as exams concerned. I just couldn't bring myself to do it. Felt like a waste of time.

Ultimately it probably was. What use are your exam scores now?

You are right. It mattered when I was applying for jobs as a fresh grad. But it no longer matters. On the other hand, I still remember lots of the ideas behind theorems though I haven't done any pure math in a long time. While most of the people I know can't remember what a vector space is anymore despite high grades. Universities need to cut down the number of exams and let kids have sometime to think and try things out. When you have competitive quizzes every two weeks whole life revolves around them. Professors used tell us that those frequent quizzes were there to help us spread the eggs in multiple baskets so that our grades didnt depend on just one exam. I think they missed the point that I wasn't there for their exam grades in the first place. Well.

Isn’t that normal? I thought studying past exams is how it works, but the questions improve so you still have to understand the topics.

Wait. So your ex _didn't_ study the old exam papers? That is like the first step in any preparation.

"If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles."

She didn’t have access to them because they weren’t made available by the professor, but instead, by past students.