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.
After watching this video
Is it cheating? or is it the profs fault for being lazy as fuck
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
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.
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"
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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?
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.
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!
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.
I study languages and every professor has to write the tests himself. We even get the old tests so we can have a look at them to see how the questions will be structured but it doesnt help you cheat in any way because the content of the questions willl be different anyway.
If teachers rely on premade tests and use those for midterms and what not and that gets leaked? Then I really I dont blame anyone for using that. It's the teachers own lazyness that's getting him.
On February 16 2012 22:20 Hidden_MotiveS wrote: 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.
The questions can have been used before. There is nothing immoral about getting tests that were given before, and study those.
If the test bank is large enough so that, for example, only 10% of it is used on any given test ... if you manage to have all 100% of the questions right from the test bank, you deserve to do well on that test...
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
BUT: Looking at patterns of past test questions isn't cheating, it's being smart. If I'm playing roulette and notice a flaw in the table that causes it to land black-11 more often than not, am I cheating by betting black 11? Nope, same shit, IMO
Wait, what on earth is this test bank? That's a pretty messed up system if you can purchase past exams that aren't provided by the institution. From what it sounds like, it's the equivalent of bribing an older student to get a copy of their past exam. To my mind, that would be clear misconduct. Having said that, teachers who frequently recycle exams leave themselves open to this type of abuse.
This is absolutely not cheating. The best way to study for any test is by doing practice questions and the practice questions should be as similar to the ones on the test. The test bank probably covers all the information he is teaching anyway. If you learn all the answers to these questions, theoretically you have also mastered the material. In the Us this is how everyonewho is smart practicies for the SATs, MCATs, LSATs, or any othger major test series. While going to the class every week you should be doing your best to learn the material. But when it is time to prepare for the test you have to do questions, otherwise you are just going to get blindsided by the exam.
Cheating would be memorizing/obtaining the answers without understanding why they are the right answer. As long as you have the basic understanding you should be able to get the questions right with a clear conscience.
On February 16 2012 22:20 Hidden_MotiveS wrote: 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.
The questions can have been used before. There is nothing immoral about getting tests that were given before, and study those.
If the test bank is large enough so that, for example, only 10% of it is used on any given test ... if you manage to have all 100% of the questions right from the test bank, you deserve to do well on that test...
You don't know how large the test bank is. I did not make any assumptions on it and I don't know why you're allowed too.
Some classes are purely memorization based and even for the ones that aren't, once you've seen how to do a problem the exact way once, chances are you won't get it wrong again.
There is nothing wrong about studying from tests that were given before, I will agree with that.
Honestly, I think a lot of the people in this thread have a different sense of morality than I do, or they're in high school and have no idea what kind of questions get tested in university. I think using test banks is immoral whereas others don't. It's worse for me though, since I might use the test bank even though I knew it was immoral to do it.
On February 16 2012 22:20 Hidden_MotiveS wrote: 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.
The questions can have been used before. There is nothing immoral about getting tests that were given before, and study those.
If the test bank is large enough so that, for example, only 10% of it is used on any given test ... if you manage to have all 100% of the questions right from the test bank, you deserve to do well on that test...
You don't know how large the test bank is. I did not make any assumptions on it and I don't know why you're allowed too.
Some classes are purely memorization based and even for the ones that aren't, once you've seen how to do a problem the exact way once, chances are you won't get it wrong again.
There is nothing wrong about studying from tests that were given before, I will agree with that.
Honestly, I think a lot of the people in this thread have a different sense of morality than I do, or they're in high school and have no idea what kind of questions get tested in university. I think using test banks is immoral whereas others don't. It's worse for me though, since I might use the test bank even though I knew it was immoral to do it.
Honestly I don't see the problem with using a test bank even if the test were exactly the same every year and therefore you can know exactly whats going to be on the test. It's their prerogative to test you on the scope of the subject, if it's so down to memorization that you can memorize answers exactly then it's either really stupid to give you access to the test bank in the first place, or they consider being able to memorize everything in the test bank to be an acceptable level of achievement for the subject.
Any moral concerns would be the actual act of obtaining the test bank. Eg if it wasn't publicly available and you had to get it via dodgy means then it would be immoral to get access to it.
If they are giving you access to a test bank and expect you not to make a basic logical connection that these questions are likely to be on the exam, then that's just retarded and they should make the exams better. More likely they don't actually give a shit how much you know besides exactly whats on the test bank, by memorizing the test bank you will have learnt everything they expect you to take away from the subject anyway.
I think the test bank is ok to study with, but studying using the previous midterm/finals knowing that most of that paper will be reused in your coming exam is kinda cheating.
And to those claiming profs are 'lazy', think twice. Sometimes it just isn't possible to generate completely new exams for each new semester. Plus, they have prepare a grading scheme(for consistent grading purposes) on top of that. Add in other classes they have to teach etc, and you'll find out they don't really have that much time at all. To those who say TAs help with grading mid-terms/finals, there's probably something wrong with the school's system if that's the case.
Anyway, at the end of the day, it's down to whether you want to really learn in depth or not. Grades don't matter that much in life. Just don't get your transcript peppered with too many Cs, and focus on what's really important.
On February 16 2012 19:04 Rickson wrote: 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.
If that's the case, there's nothing wrong with it. Instructors often use questions from past exams, and those same past exams are often made available to students by the university. In fact, more than 0.6% of the question come from past exam papers, so there's nothing wrong with studying from a question bank as large as the one you're using. If the question bank contained 120 questions on the other hand, and it wasn't publicly available to students, it would be another story,
That said, I'm not quite sure how you plan to study from a test bank with 10,000 questions (or even 2,500 if you only need to study 5 of the chapters). Assuming the test is designed to take 1 hour, that means 2,500 questions should take 42 hours to go through once, and it's not as if you'll remember the answers to those questions if you see them once (or even a few times). It seems more efficient to simply study the work (which shouldn't take more than 40 hours), and then use the testbank to set up a few mock tests and see how you fare.
Honestly, the academic staff is mainly to blame for using something such as testbanks.
In my line of work, before the exams are handed out to the students, at least one and at most two persons have seen any question of the exam. That is one, the professor who thought of the question, of course, and two, maybe - only maybe - an assistant the professor trusts in to keep everything secret and give him honest feedback about the difficulty level on the exam. Of course, the difficulty of such exams can vary very much, which is why there is no fixed percentage of points needed to reach a certain level. After the exams have been graded (with points), all of the assistants and the professor take a look at the points and decide on the amount of points needed to pass and which grade is giving after reaching how many points.
You can use a test bank and trust on the honesty of all the students. But this is just stupid because under so many students there will always be few people who will try hard to cheat, and more people who can be persuaded easily to cheat, should the few have found a good way to do so.
On February 16 2012 18:30 Rickson wrote: 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.
Sounds like the publisher found a clever way to profit off students looking for practice. That's kind of smart!
This doesn't sound like academic dishonesty - you're using resources that you could purchase fairly. Believe me, much worse things are going on.
During my first year of grad school I witnessed a lot of shenanigans firsthand from people who already have a BS in engineering. Primarily, the international students traded years worth of old homeworks and tests (same with American students, but to a far less degree). Some of these exams were not handed back to the class which means the old student got the exam back from the professor themselves on the condition of not sharing it with anyone. One time we had a midterm and the top five scores in the class were students who had the homework from the year before (over half the exam questions were on that assignment). It pissed me off that I was studying my butt off and not getting very far while some classmates were light years ahead due to answer keys and old work.
There are upsides to this story. The students who took shortcuts for better grades had to study much harder later down the road. Additionally, they have less long term retention than the students who studied the material apart from question banks.
When it all comes down to it, professors anticipate things like this. If used as a crutch instead of a study tool the students are only hurting themselves, so a lot of professors don't really care. They're extremely busy people and if they are at a research institution then their ability to teach is secondary.
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
BUT: Looking at patterns of past test questions isn't cheating, it's being smart. If I'm playing roulette and notice a flaw in the table that causes it to land black-11 more often than not, am I cheating by betting black 11? Nope, same shit, IMO
Actually you are cheating by doing that, you'd get banned and blacklisted from casinos really quickly for it. Also just because the school doesn't have any protection against something doesn't mean that it isn't cheating. For example if I could put a screen into my contact lenses which allowed me to browse through things when I shut my eyes it would still be cheating even if none could possibly notice it. As long as the examiner sees it as cheating then it is.
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.
The problem with the popular notion of academic honesty is that very few of the courses you're required to take are based on developing skills or gaining any meaningful understanding of course material. It's either just memorization of pedantic notation, or reading what some person said about some topic. Almost none of it has any real world application, and long-term recall of the content is irrelevant beyond just a cursory knowledge of the material. If the objective of the course is purely and simply to pass with a given letter grade, then using a test bank to facilitate that end is predictable, expected, and entirely rational.
It's not cheating or "immoral". Seriously the whole grading system is flawed and the fact that your professor is lazy as fuck makes it worse. If he had the inclination to write his own tests he could. But 99% of professors care more about their grant work and research than their undergrad students.
Do you understand the material? Do you feel that an A accurately represents your ability level with the subject material? Then you should feel fine about using the test bank to study. If your professor actually gave a shit, he'd write his own questions.
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.
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.
Is it cheating? or is it the profs fault for being lazy as fuck
thoughts?
When I TA, and help to make exams, we think about these types of things explicitly and make new tests from scratch. He's lazy. Its fine to use test bank.
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?
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.
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
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? Anybody got that clip from gump in the army baracks in his mind, shouting at the drill seargent?
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.
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.
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!!"
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...
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?
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)
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 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
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.
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?
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.
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.
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).
I had someone straight up ask my professor if it was a good idea from study from his previous tests, he just asked for the kid's name and continued with the lecture.. scary. anyways, why did they have 500 students in a capstone course, shouldn't that be like 10 students? cmon ucf
That professor is a lazy bastard. I know plenty of professors like him at my university who constantly reuse the same stuff. Most people i know have the past questions for tests/exams (the good profs will even give it to you). They reap what they sow. If he's going to be lazy and taking questions from a publicly available set of questions or re-use questions from past tests/exams, that isn't cheating, its smart studying. I'll tell you what cheating is, copying friend's assignments, notes in an exam etc. Studying past questions cause the professor is too lazy to make up new ones isn't cheating.
On February 17 2012 16:50 Klockan3 wrote: 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.
Hm I don't see the difference between doing (publicly available) past tests with a professor that re-uses questions from past tests and using a (publicly available) test bank with a professor that re-uses questions from said test bank. So how is one fine while the other is not?
EPT
I'm asking what TL thinks about using test banks. 
