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On February 17 2012 02:18 Uranium wrote:
Edit: On that note, are you studying engineering/science or one of the 'social sciences'? If you are studying engineering/science then you are much better off actually understanding what you are doing. But I don't think there's any way you could do 2500 engineering problems in a few days, so this must be social science. In that case, just don't even care because your degree is bullshit and you wouldn't learn anything real anyway.
Actually it is way more important to do the old exams over and over if you are studying engineering lol. Practicing is way more rewarding for this kind of stuff.
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Ask the professor. That will resolve the issue once and for all.
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intrigue
Washington, D.C9935 Posts
i think cheating will be an obsolete concept in academia for kids born today. they're going to be so wired to wikipedia and google on their brainchips or whatever that nobody can stop anyone else from getting data when they want. tests might turn out to be geared more towards actual processing and critical thinking, which is great
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On February 17 2012 01:56 Klockan3 wrote:Ask your examiner, if he is okay with it then it isn't cheating. Otherwise it is.
Wow, so cheating is whatever the examiner decides it is?
Anybody got that clip from gump in the army baracks in his mind, shouting at the drill seargent?
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On February 17 2012 03:11 JustPassingBy wrote:Show nested quote +On February 17 2012 01:56 Klockan3 wrote:
Is it cheating? or is it the profs fault for being lazy as fuck
Ask your examiner, if he is okay with it then it isn't cheating. Otherwise it is. Wow, so cheating is whatever the examiner decides it is?
Of course it is, he alone decides on how the course will be examined and thus he alone knows what the students are allowed to do. It is his responsibility that the students examined during the course actually knows what they are supposed to. How else would you decide on what is cheating?
Also, the professor being lazy doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want. If a professor is lazy and accidentally leaves his test for some students to get before the exam is given those students are cheating if they don't notify the examiner of what happened. Just because it is easy to cheat doesn't mean that it is justified.
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You must talk to the dean by 7am Monday. I am altering the deal, pray I don't alter it any further.
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I found this pretty ridiculous.
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To me this just illustrates how (a significant number of) academics are hopelessly divorced from the real world.
If you're doing a real job in the real world, you use all resources available to deal with the problem at hand. But universities for the most part don't prepare you for the real world; they give you a piece of paper that certifies how good you were at jumping through a bunch of arbitrary hoops.
If you were working in the real world and your boss told you that your next project was to get the best grade you could on a multiple choice exam, your boss would expect you to access old tests to prepare. You'd be criticized if you didn't look at them. In university if you do this you get called unethical. It actually infuriates me to see this idiot strutting back and forth. He thinks he's doing the students a favor by teaching them. The reality is that students are paying more and more to get degrees that are worth less and less.
"If you have to give birth, you'll give birth in the exam room". What a blowhard. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad for the poor students.
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I would not consider this certain act to be cheating.
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On February 17 2012 05:45 ziggurat wrote:
If you were working in the real world and your boss told you that your next project was to get the best grade you could on a multiple choice exam, your boss would expect you to access old tests to prepare. You'd be criticized if you didn't look at them. In university if you do this you get called unethical.
Sorry but that is just plain wrong.
We have access to all exercises & all exams (and test exams) dating back at least 10years. They're in our universities library (in printed form) and no one blames us if we use them to prepare for our tests.
And absolutely no one (!) calls us unethical when utilizing those examples - we're encouraged to use them.
This is ONE case of a lazy prof who uses material from an outside source to test his students.
There are a ton of professors who take their teaching obligation serious (I admit though there are a lot who dont^^). For me personally: I know the TAs create the exams (since they create the exercices - know better what the students are capable of ...). And the prof himself sits down and completes this exam (though he only gives himself 50% of the time) before it is "Ok" to give it to the students.
Honestly - if you want to attack the university system - attack the system for using multiple choice (though I never had a single multiple choice exam in my whole university life). It's a stupid system to test knowledge after all.
Or attack the lazy prof - he even said "my team was able to come up with a new test - WHILE running those complicated (lol) statistical tests - within 96 hours". He basically even admits that he was too lazy.
Overall though he seems like an idiot "I KNOW WHO YOU ARE!!! But - still - everyone has to retake the test! - Not only those cheaters!!"
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Lord_J
Kenya1085 Posts
On February 16 2012 18:30 Rickson wrote:
Is it cheating? or is it the profs fault for being lazy as fuck
thoughts?
I don't think it's cheating. That said, if the school allows its professors to do that, then the school is pretty terrible IMO. I would complain to the administration personally, or just not go to a school like that in the first place...
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On February 16 2012 22:58 Skilledblob wrote:Show nested quote +On February 16 2012 22:28 PleasureImWallace wrote:
That prof is so full of bullshit when it comes to "We will have a list of everyone who cheated"
Unfortunately, some kids who cheated probably came forward because they thought he was being legit
You can't look at tests scores and tell who cheated, although he did give a good delivery, very heartfelt
if 50 people are giving the same answer word for word then you can be damn sure they cheated.
I think people are misunderstanding this. The kind of course that has 600+ students in it and pulls its exam questions from a test bank isn't the kind of course that requires essay questions for tests. It's almost certainly multiple choice. Unless the test bank is really large compared to the test (like the 10,000 question bank vs ~50 question exam the OP is talking about), it's certainly cheating to use a test bank for studying.
I think there's a more important question to consider: What the hell is a multiple choice test doing in a college level course in the first place?
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On February 17 2012 07:36 Omnipresent wrote:Show nested quote +On February 16 2012 22:58 Skilledblob wrote:On February 16 2012 22:28 PleasureImWallace wrote:
That prof is so full of bullshit when it comes to "We will have a list of everyone who cheated"
Unfortunately, some kids who cheated probably came forward because they thought he was being legit
You can't look at tests scores and tell who cheated, although he did give a good delivery, very heartfelt
if 50 people are giving the same answer word for word then you can be damn sure they cheated. I think people are misunderstanding this. The kind of course that has 600+ students in it and pulls its exam questions from a test bank isn't the kind of course that requires essay questions for tests. It's almost certainly multiple choice. Unless the test bank is really large compared to the test (like the 10,000 question bank vs ~50 question exam the OP is talking about), it's certainly cheating to use a test bank for studying. I think there's a more important question to consider: What the hell is a multiple choice test doing in a college level course in the first place?
I dont want to get into specifics but its one of the largest Canadian Universities and its a first year course in Business Administration.
The prof is kind of odd, he's a very intelligent person and reading his CV it looks like hes done a lot in the field that hes in- but this goes against his teaching style and personality ( very passive and lazy)
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Why is this even cheating. The point is to not to get a right or wrong answer, the point is for you to know the thing your doing a test about. Whatever means you take to get to the stage you know tthat, do it. Whatever really.
school isn't about passing tests, its about learning. Just by coming up with this testbank sollution you just presented you solved a problem and learned something aswell.
On February 17 2012 07:01 Zocat wrote:Show nested quote +On February 17 2012 05:45 ziggurat wrote:
If you were working in the real world and your boss told you that your next project was to get the best grade you could on a multiple choice exam, your boss would expect you to access old tests to prepare. You'd be criticized if you didn't look at them. In university if you do this you get called unethical.
Sorry but that is just plain wrong. We have access to all exercises & all exams (and test exams) dating back at least 10years. They're in our universities library (in printed form) and no one blames us if we use them to prepare for our tests. And absolutely no one (!) calls us unethical when utilizing those examples - we're encouraged to use them. This is ONE case of a lazy prof who uses material from an outside source to test his students. There are a ton of professors who take their teaching obligation serious (I admit though there are a lot who dont^^). For me personally: I know the TAs create the exams (since they create the exercices - know better what the students are capable of ...). And the prof himself sits down and completes this exam (though he only gives himself 50% of the time) before it is "Ok" to give it to the students. Honestly - if you want to attack the university system - attack the system for using multiple choice (though I never had a single multiple choice exam in my whole university life). It's a stupid system to test knowledge after all. Or attack the lazy prof - he even said "my team was able to come up with a new test - WHILE running those complicated (lol) statistical tests - within 96 hours". He basically even admits that he was too lazy. Overall though he seems like an idiot "I KNOW WHO YOU ARE!!! But - still - everyone has to retake the test! - Not only those cheaters!!"
IIRC past tests are public in sweden. Its against the law not being able to access past tests, atleast on a uni level. But this is just what i recall from a vague memory, dont quote me on it
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I can't even begin to fathom how this is cheating. If you want to debate semantics of what "learning" something really means, fine. But I'll only engage in that after the removal of multiple choice tests and attendance/participation grades.
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I did stop the video about halfway through, so hopefully I'm not missing anything important... but of course public test banks aren't cheating, wtf? Hell, at my university, it was a big part of everyone's studying, doing past tests, etc.. profs and books don't give you enough relevant practice and it's impossible to do well in certain subjects without practice. I also obviously used past tests of my prof to study, obtained from friends, which is also perfectly fine since they were allowed to keep said tests.. so I only imagine the prof was happy to let them share it.
Quite often a prof re-uses the same concept for a question with different numbers (so basically identical question), and there's no way around it. They have to ask that question to make sure we know that material, and I have knowledge that this question will be asked so I study the approach and learn it.
If it's something sketchy like a guy taking pictures of an exam while taking it, and then sharing them later (because they weren't allowed to keep the actual paper; quite common for finals), that's obviously cheating. But if it's publicly available, like if the aforementioned finals paper went up on the uni site test bank, I don't see how anybody can argue otherwise.
e:
On February 17 2012 02:26 Derez wrote:
Am I right in assuming that these questions were multiple choice and that students just memorized answers? If that's the case, isn't it pretty clear cheating?
If the test bank is public, I don't see why this would be cheating. Granted as a student, for yourself, you should learn why the answers are what they are .. but if you're only interested in memorizing the answers to particular questions, that's fine too. It's a high risk/reward strategy, you're giving up any flexibility and understanding, for less studying time and potentially higher grade. A friend of mine used to do this for certain accounting/econ/finance etc courses as there are, for some parts, only a few potential ways a question could be asked, and he'd memorize the answers for each situation.. and when the question inevitably came up on the exam, he spit out what was relevant. I didn't do this, I learned the approach, and tried to figure out the answer on the spot, but his approach worked fine too. What's the difference?
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On February 17 2012 03:05 intrigue wrote:
i think cheating will be an obsolete concept in academia for kids born today. they're going to be so wired to wikipedia and google on their brainchips or whatever that nobody can stop anyone else from getting data when they want. tests might turn out to be geared more towards actual processing and critical thinking, which is great
This is a very good point. In fact, analogous changes will occur in many aspects of society, particularly economic activity. Intellectual property is an obsolete concept.
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On February 17 2012 10:11 JeeJee wrote:
I did stop the video about halfway through, so hopefully I'm not missing anything important... but of course public test banks aren't cheating, wtf? Hell, at my university, it was a big part of everyone's studying, doing past tests, etc..
This isn't about doing past tests, this is about the professor having bought a set of tests from a testbank and using those then a student finds out buys the same tests so he knows exactly what can come on the next exam. Doing past tests is fine, none is arguing against that.
On February 17 2012 05:45 ziggurat wrote:
To me this just illustrates how (a significant number of) academics are hopelessly divorced from the real world.
If you're doing a real job in the real world, you use all resources available to deal with the problem at hand. But universities for the most part don't prepare you for the real world; they give you a piece of paper that certifies how good you were at jumping through a bunch of arbitrary hoops.
If you were working in the real world and your boss told you that your next project was to get the best grade you could on a multiple choice exam, your boss would expect you to access old tests to prepare. You'd be criticized if you didn't look at them. In university if you do this you get called unethical. It actually infuriates me to see this idiot strutting back and forth. He thinks he's doing the students a favor by teaching them. The reality is that students are paying more and more to get degrees that are worth less and less.
"If you have to give birth, you'll give birth in the exam room". What a blowhard. It would be funny if it wasn't so sad for the poor students.
This is more akin to industrial espionage in the real world, we aren't talking about past tests but the current test.
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Osaka27178 Posts
First, I think that professor is a huge donk. I did last time I watched it, and I do now.
Second, a test should be a measure of your study during the term. If you have done your job, and the professor has done his job, the test should be easy for you without the test bank.
If you just study the question bank and not the concepts of the class you might get a good grade, but you won't take away anything from the course. Trust me, I don't remember anything about the two disaster management classes I took and aced via question banks. It just depends on what you want to take away form the class (sometimes a grade is all you want).
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EPT
