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i have two perspectives. the sort of... kantian perspective. like... when you look back on this decision, many years from now. in the grand scheme of things, is it meaningful to cheat. what purpose is your life for. what is your goals and motivation. in order to get there do you want to cheat on a mid term. i mean... seriously?
second is... whatever happens, the responsbility can't rest fully on you. for the situation to even occur, there is some responsibility on the professor, and everyone involved in creating the situation, the university, the test bank, etc... so.. might as well take this opportunity to get the best possible outcome. now to be honest, you should be able to get a good mark without cheating, and if you learn the material, which is the whole point, then you should do fine on the exam. but maybe it's a hard course, or you have a heavy course load... soo.... you gotta do the calculation and as far as im concerned, i'm trusting you
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I don't think using a test bank to study is cheating at all. If its a publicly available resource then by all means use it. Its not as if you're memorizing the exact exam in its entirety. The way I see it, it is the professor's duty to make sure that the tests are varied every time. If there's a flaw in my logic then someone by all means correct me, but as far as I can tell a test bank (as you describe it) does not really count as cheating.
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On February 16 2012 18:52 Immaterial wrote:
I don't think using a test bank to study is cheating at all. If its a publicly available resource then by all means use it. Its not as if you're memorizing the exact exam in its entirety. The way I see it, it is the professor's duty to make sure that the tests are varied every time. If there's a flaw in my logic then someone by all means correct me, but as far as I can tell a test bank (as you describe it) does not really count as cheating.
Agreed. It's akin to expecting a company ignoring a rivals data that was leaked by someone else. Anyhow I would imagine doing all of the problems in the textbook would be pretty similar. Not something I have personally done, but I would not look down on someone for using something freely available.
Regardless publishers test banks are given out to way to many people to expect a secure test. There is a reason the ACT and SAT use new test every time, it's to hard to keep it secure and isn't fair to those who don't have the means or desire to find old tests.
Also that prof saying that he could pinpoint all the students who cheated is complete bullshit. I would of admitted I cheated even if I didn't to avoid the chance of being randomly fucked by the "forensic analysis"
Edit: Its a 10,000 question test bank. Wow
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I don't get the logic that you're entitled to try to cheat and it's the professor's fault if you're successful.That's the sort of logic I heard kids make in middle school when they were doing something blatantly wrong.
Hey, it's your money if you want to pay the university to give you a worthless A.
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On February 16 2012 19:00 Jerubaal wrote:
I don't get the logic that you're entitled to try to cheat and it's the professor's fault if you're successful.That's the sort of logic I heard kids make in middle school when they were doing something blatantly wrong.
Hey, it's your money if you want to pay the university to give you a worthless A.
not a worthless A but a sexy A+
don't blame the student, blame the system, down with the grading system
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Actually, my motivation in school is to do well. The test bank itself is filled with 10,000 questions and the test is 60 questions multiple choice. But out of those 10,000 questions these 60 questions will be in there for sure so if i spend the time doing all the questions, (10,000 questions for 20 chapters-only being tested on 5) which will only take a few days.
On February 16 2012 19:00 Jerubaal wrote:
I don't get the logic that you're entitled to try to cheat and it's the professor's fault if you're successful.That's the sort of logic I heard kids make in middle school when they were doing something blatantly wrong.
Hey, it's your money if you want to pay the university to give you a worthless A.
That's why this blog is here  I'm asking what TL thinks about using test banks.
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On February 16 2012 19:00 Jerubaal wrote:
I don't get the logic that you're entitled to try to cheat and it's the professor's fault if you're successful.That's the sort of logic I heard kids make in middle school when they were doing something blatantly wrong.
Hey, it's your money if you want to pay the university to give you a worthless A.
I'm not encouraging cheating I was just saying that I am not sure whether or not a test bank is cheating to begin with. If you have an exact copy of the test and you memorize the answers then you're certainly cheating. However, if you're looking at an old test to get an idea of what to expect on the the new test then I consider that nothing more than a good studying technique. For instance, a student is not cheating on the SAT if he takes 100 practice SAT's to prepare. Perhaps I am missing a detail about what the test bank actually is?
edit: With the new information that the test bank contains thousands of questions while the test itself is only 60 I think it would be completely absurd to say that utilizing would be cheating. If anything you'd be unwise NOT to use it. For my chem final last semester we had the option to pay 10 dollars the weekend before to basically go over an old test with an experienced student. The final itself ended up containing very, very similar content. I don't see how this differs at all from using a huge test bank in order to know what to expect on the midterm.
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I wouldn't bother doing it personally, that way you avoid the moral dilemna altogether! Just do something else for studying, although I don't know what the subject is so I suppose that might be more or less difficult.
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I feel like a lot of people are misinterpreting the OP. The question isn't whether cheating is justified or not, the question is if the provided example falls into the category of "academic dishonesty" or if its merely a smart studying strategy. Its clear that full-on cheating is a waste of the cheater's time and money as a student and shows an overall lack of integrity that could be a problem throughout his/her life; no one doubts that. I suspect, however, that the particular grey area (if it can even be called that) mentioned in the OP is neither cheating nor immoral. You'd have to be more-than-a-little-bit overzealous about academic integrity to consider a 10,000 question test bank cheating. To use my previous example again taking an old SAT to prepare for your real SAT is not cheating in the slightest.
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On February 16 2012 19:18 Immaterial wrote:
I feel like a lot of people are misinterpreting the OP. The question isn't whether cheating is justified or not, the question is if the provided example falls into the category of "academic dishonesty" or if its merely a smart studying strategy. Its clear that full-on cheating is a waste of the cheater's time and money as a student and shows an overall lack of integrity that could be a problem throughout his/her life; no one doubts that. I suspect, however, that the particular grey area (if it can even be called that) mentioned in the OP is neither cheating nor immoral. You'd have to be more-than-a-little-bit overzealous about academic integrity to consider a 10,000 question test bank cheating. To use my previous example again taking an old SAT to prepare for your real SAT is not cheating in the slightest.
ahh you're right. T__T;;
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doubleupgradeobbies!
Australia1353 Posts
Just separate learning from your marks. The marking system is ultimately quite pointless, I'm sure the rest of the class is also cramming heaps of temporarily memorized data which they haven't really learned and will forget shortly after the exam. Memorizing answers for questions you know will be on the exam is just a more efficient version of this. It would be silly not to take advantage of this to get ultimately a fairly meaningless but higher mark.
But you need to be honest to yourself about whether or not you actually learned enough to be satisfied with your overall experience in the subject. Even if you are not, it's no reason for you to get a lower mark if you don't have to, but you can proactively study more in your own time to make sure you have learnt what you want to learn.
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Interesting blog!
No, I hardly think its cheating.
its not like they had the exact test and simply memorized it, they simply studied similar material.
Its not their fault that the testing system is mainly testing memorization instead of understanding.
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What am I even.... I don't..... can anyone explain...
OFCOURSE you can use these questions to study, they should represent questions you want to be able to answer after learning the course material. So using them to study for your exam would be the smart thing to do, and not using them would be FUCKING RETARDED.
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I would definitely use those. It may be cheating, but it's a very weak form of cheating.
I hate to be the cynic here, but you're going to university to walk away with a degree to get you a higher-income job later on that you wouldn't have gotten without it. You're still ultimately learning the material since you seem to be a dedicated student, and if it'll ultimately get you a better grade with more efficiency, why not?
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Last semester this was the case for a bunch of my classes, except I knew people who had these sources to previous material from people they knew in courses before etc. Personally I think its the professors fault for being lazy as fuck. Anything that they have released before, is fair game to study, its now an external resource. You won't be able to get any answers for finals, but you will be able to get a very good idea what to study. Additionally, your probably not just going to study that just in case so you end up learning all the material anyways. The way I look at it is as long as its available somewhere somehow, there will be another group of students using this resource and most likely nothing will happen to them, so why put yourself at a disadvantage?
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On February 16 2012 18:30 Rickson wrote:
Hi TL! So if you did read my last blog I'm happily to say I am out of that slump and back into that motivated student that I was. Good food, family, exercise and friends and spiritual rejuvenation helped me get out of that depressed state completely!
Anyways, just something I had thought about while studying.
I have a midterm coming up and the professor uses generic questions from the testbank provided by the publishers. This is very obvious because the sample questions, sample midterm, all reflect the same pattern and type -furthermore student's last semester said he uses the same tests every 3~4 year in cycles. So my question is, is it cheating if I used the test bank to study? Now this test bank CAN be purchased through third party sources but not directly from the publisher and the publisher even sells it through third party merchants via a cd rom format.
You are trying to learn something. You should use all available resources to do so.
It's like laddering ...
Making it from diamond to masters, is harder than maintaining a masters level. If you are getting C's, getting B's require a lot more studying from you than someone who is getting A's require to get B's. Someone might say that you shouldn't use that material because it's 'bad' ... that's the same people that say you shouldn't 6 pool 4 gate or 1-1-1. Results is what matters. If you are planning on actually needing to understand something, then you should study it in depth, rather than taking the easy way out, but there's nothing wrong with spending your time short-term focusing on what gives the best results.
If I could give any advice to a student studying anything, it's to look up what you will need to study in the future, and what courses they are built on, and really, really learn those things well. You can be slack in other subjects that you can with reasonable certainty say won't be relevant in the future.
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I don't think this is cheating either...as long as there is no explicit policy against doing so, you should be allowed to use anything to help study. If the test ends up being the same, well then it is simply a fortunate turn of events for you. The university can't punish students who use all the resources they can, while deliberately withholding crucial information about what resources are allowed; the onus is on them to communicate what is allowed and not. And I suppose this might change depending on the prof, so just listen to what he/she says!
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Seems like the people in that video got a slap on the wrist. Happened to one of my courses first year too :/
Test bank is immoral. Dunno if I'd do it. A test bank is a list of questions profs can choose from to put on an exam. They're made by publishers. When the Prof puts them on a test they expect students to have never seen those said problems before.
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EPT
