200 Students Admit To 'Cheating' On Exam... But Bigger Question Is If It Was Really Cheating Or Studying

from the wait-a-second... dept

A friend passed on this Telegraph story about how 200 students in a Strategic Management class at the University of Central Florida came forward to admit to "cheating" on the midterm exam after the professor in the class, Richard Quinn, gave a lecture where he noted the evidence that about 1/3 of the 600 student class had "cheated" on the exam. He then gave them an option: saying that, if they admitted to cheating within a week,re they would be able to complete the class and the incident would not go on their record and they would not face discipline (they also had to take an ethics class). If they did not, and they were still caught, then they could face expulsion for violating academic integrity policies. You can watch the video of the lecture here: Not surprisingly, the story of 200 students "turning themselves over" made all sorts of headlines. It's a good story of "cheaters" being pressured into 'fessing up... right? It's leading to typical hand-wringing stories about what should we do about cheating in schools. But, as I watched the video, the whole thing started to feel just a little bit off... My main interest was to learn two things: (1) what the students did to cheat and (2) how the professor was identifying who cheated. Both points seemed like pertinent details.

The answer to that first one surprised me. The "cheating" was that students got their hands on the textbook publisher's "testbank" of questions. Many publishers have a testbank that professors can use as sample test questions. But watching Quinn's video, it became clear that in accusing his students of "cheating" he was really admitting that he wasn't actually writing his own tests, but merely pulling questions from a testbank. That struck me as odd -- and I wasn't really sure that what the students did should count as cheating. Taking "sample tests" is a very good way to learn material, and going through a testbank is a good way to practice "sample" questions. It seemed like the bigger issue wasn't what the students did... but what the professor did.

In looking around, it looks like a lot of the students agree. They're saying that the real issue is that Prof. Quinn simply copied questions from the publisher, rather than actually recreating his own test, and noting that this seems like a massive double standard. The professor is allowed to just copy questions from others for his tests? In fact, some of the students have put together a video pointing out that, at the beginning of the year, Prof. Quinn claimed that he had written the test questions himself. As the article notes:

Can the UCF students be blamed for using all the available tools to study for the test? How were the students to know that Quinn would take his questions from the test bank, when he explicitly said that professors do not do so any more? Moreover, why did Quinn tell his students that he is the one who creates the mid-term and final exams, when in fact it wasn’t so?

The students have put together a video pointing out where he said (in the first lecture) that he writes the questions himself: The local student news operation sent a reporter to speak to Quinn and ask him about the double standard and his copying of questions, and Quinn totally ignored him: Now, there's a pretty good chance that some of the students probably knew that Quinn was a lazy professor, who just used testbank questions, rather than writing his own. That's the kind of information that tends to get around. But it's still not clear that using testbank questions to study is really an ethical lapse. Taking sample tests is a good way to practice for an exam and to learn the subject matter. And while those 200 students "confessed," it seems like they did so mainly to avoid getting kicked out of school -- not because they really feel they did anything wrong -- and I might have to agree with them.

We've seen plenty of stories over the years about professors trying to keep up with modern technology -- and I recognize that it's difficult to keep creating new exams for classes. But in this case, it looks like Prof. Quinn barely created anything at all. He just pulled questions from a source that the students had access to as well and copied them verbatim. It would seem that, even if you think the students did wrong here, the Professor was equally negligent. Will he have to sit through an ethics class too?

Filed Under: cheating, ethics, students, tests

Video Game Exec Claims Used Games 'Cheat' Developers

from the lets-learn-you-some-economics dept

For whatever reason, every few months or so, yet another clueless video game company exec spouts off about how the used video game market is somehow unfair or hurting video game developers. We've seen it again and again and again. However, since a whole bunch of you keep submitting the story that Cory Ledesma from THQ has made the downright laughable claim that the used video game market "cheats" developers, it seemed worth discussing.

This shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the law, basic economics and the customers THQ is failing to serve. On the law, Ledesma and others should familiarize themselves with the First Sale doctrine before making silly statements. On economics, repeated studies have shown that a healthy secondary market for products actually significantly helps the primary market. If you take more than a second and a half to think about it, it's easy to understand why. If there's a healthy secondary market for products, it reduces the risk for the buyers in the primary market. That is, if they buy the product and don't like it, they know they'll be able to resell it and recoup some of their losses. That makes it effectively cheaper for them to buy the primary product, increasing the number of sales. On top of that, the secondary market also helps in markets like video games in acting as a good way to segment the market, and get new buyers into a game or series of games. I'm sure many of the folks who are now buyers in the primary market, at one time purchased an earlier game in a series used. How is it that so many video gaming execs have so much trouble recognizing these basic concepts?

Filed Under: cheating, cory ledesma, secondary markets, used games, video games
Companies: thq

Student Punished For Facebook Study Group Files $10 Million Lawsuit

from the going-overboard dept

Two years ago, we chronicled what seemed like a bizarre story of Ryerson student Chris Avenir, who was threatened with expulsion for daring to setup an online study group for his chemistry class on Facebook. The university accused him of cheating, when he noted that this was really no different than if a bunch of the students all got together to study. The whole thing seemed pretty ridiculous. Eventually, the school decided not to expel him, but still punished him by giving him a zero on one assignment and putting a "disciplinary note" in his file. This still seemed ridiculous. How dare he get students together to study the material! In fact, many schools now encourage those kinds of online study groups.

That said, it's difficult to support Avenir's latest move, which is to file a class action lawsuit against Ryerson, asking for $10 million because he wasn't allowed to have a lawyer present at his disciplinary hearing (found via Michael Scott):

A statement of claim filed on Mr. Avenir's behalf says that students enrolled at Ryerson have been denied the right to have a lawyer present at disciplinary hearings. According to the document, the university violated its policy requiring that all hearings comply with the Statutory Powers Procedure Act, which guarantees a right to legal counsel. The policy states that all its Senate hearings must "be conducted in a manner consistent with" the act.

This is just taking it too far. Yes, the disciplinary action was crazy, but a $10 million class action lawsuit? That seems like a response purely out of spite.

Filed Under: cheating, chris avenir, class action, students, study group
Companies: facebook, ryerson university

University Offers New Grade For Cheating Students: FD

from the fail'd? dept

There's certainly a lot of concern at universities these days about how some students may be using modern technology to cheat in some manner or another, but does that ability to cheat require a change to the grading system? Apparently Simon Fraser University believes so. It's instituting a special new failing grade for students caught cheating: FD. They say it will only be used in cases of repeat offenders caught doing things considered to be egregious cheating -- and that it will only stay on the transcript for two years. It's an interesting idea, but is it really all that different than a typical failing grade? Will students act differently because the potential of a temporary FD grade instead of an F? And if it's a case of a repeat offender taking part in egregious cheating, why not just kick them out and refuse to give them a degree?

Filed Under: cheating, failing grades, universities
Companies: simon fraser university

Is It Cheating Or Is It Collaboration?

from the sounds-like-collaboration dept

A few years back, we had an interesting discussion around the idea that many students might not view using modern technology to share answers as "cheating" so much as they would view it as wikipedia-like collaboration. I thought this was an interesting observation, since I'd never really thought of it that way. Someone who ought to remain anonymous alerts me to a discussion of a recent study on student "cheating" on exams via mobile phones and similar technology, which found, not only that lots of kids do it, but that they don't think it's wrong. In the comments to that post, there's a fascinating comment by Ryan Scott that again highlights the point about collaboration:

The premise of memorization is the problem here. What's far more important than memorizing some formulas is knowing where to find them and how to apply them.

In NO industry is collaboration considered cheating. Only in SCHOOL is this a problem. What are we teaching our kids?

I'm an employer. I want my employees reaching out and building networks of people that can help them. I struggle with this whole 'that's cheating' attitude. It's something I need to UNTEACH my employees. It does NOT matter to me if you know how to do something, it matters to me that you can figure out how to do it. Most businesses, especially information based, need employees who know how to find and apply information, not that have a repository of facts in their heads. We are creating everything new -- NO ONE knows how to do the things many companies deal with on a daily basis unless you are a clerk of some kind. We are figuring it all out on the fly. Building alliances, search skills, knowing where and how to find information -- all these are what's valuable.

The argument that school, memorization, and solitary work teaches you how to think is absolutely wrong. If we really want to teach people how to think, we should have a class called How To Think, not Ancient Greek History. You don't teach thinking skills by forcing 30 people to memorize the same names, dates, and events. You do it by teaching principles, and by teaching directly the actual skills the education system claims to want to create.

We need more 'How to Think', 'How to Collaborate', 'How to Negotiate', 'How to Resolve Conflict' and less 'Memorize a bunch of stuff for a test'

Plagiarism is an exception. Passing off someone else's work as your own is clearly wrong. But forcing kids to memorize facts and not giving them what's truly important -- that is to say thinking skills is the big problem here.

Thinking about plagiarism some more. I'm always telling my employees to research before writing -- cobble together a collection of other people's work and give me an opinion. Build on whats already out there, don't start from scratch.

Well said. Again, I don't think that "cheating" is the problem here. The problem is this focus on not teaching people how to work together to solve problems and assuming that everything needs to be done by the individual themselves. That's not how things work in the real world, and it does children a disservice to downplay collaboration and reinforce the idea that building off the works of others is somehow wrong. Standing on the shoulders of giants is important, or we're always reinventing the wheel.

Filed Under: cheating, collaboration

Security Pros Cheating During Audits?

from the oops dept

We were just discussing if a security auditor should be liable for giving a company a passing grade if there's later a security breach. Considering that it's pretty much impossible to be perfectly secure, and there were always some things that could go wrong, it seemed like a bad idea to hold auditors liable, except in situations where there was obvious fraud or gross negligence. And now, there's evidence that security professionals may try to trick auditors, raising even more questions about why auditors should be liable. Michael Scott points us to the news that a recent survey of security pros found that 20% admit to having cheated or knowing others who cheated in order to pass a security audit. Now, the phrasing can be misleading -- by saying that "they did or they know someone who did" it could (in theory) just be one guy who cheated... who happens to know a lot of other security professionals. So, it would certainly require a bit more research to determine how widespread the cheating is. It's also not clear how many times the cheating occurred. If it's every audit, that's one thing. If it just happened once and the issue was fixed, that's quite different. Still, it's more evidence that you can't just blame the auditors -- especially when the security pros at the company may not be completely truthful in providing info to the auditors.

Filed Under: auditor, cheating, data breach, liability, security

Online Poker Cheating Scam Unraveled

from the whodunit dept

Slashdot points us to the news that the well known online poker playing site UltimateBet.com has been fined $1.5 million as part of an ongoing investigation into what appears to be a rather massive scheme to defraud online poker players by giving some insiders the ability to see all the cards other players held. Over the past year, this story has been building up steam, as the fraud was actually called out by some other players who questioned how certain players had been able to win so much. Using statistical analysis, it was shown to have been close to impossible, without inside knowledge, and the latest report does, indeed, pin some of the blame on a well-known poker player who was an initial "consultant" to one of the companies involved in this mess. If you read the MSNBC link above, you'll see that there are a number of different companies involved, but it sounds as though many are simply shell companies for the same group of people, with attempts to move assets around for a variety of purposes. So, it's not yet entirely clear who was involved beyond the one player named, but more names are expected to be released later this year, as investigators finish up their investigation.

What may be most interesting about the whole ordeal was that it was exposed not by the body charged with actually regulating the online casino, but other players who were able to sniff out the details working together in online forums. Chalk another one up to the wisdom of the crowd.

Filed Under: cheating, online poker, scam
Companies: ultimatebet.com

Is It Test Prep... Or Is It A Copyright Violation?

from the misuses-of-copyright-law dept

The standardized testing business is a big business -- though many are extremely critical of it. However, given how many universities rely on standardized tests for admissions, it's difficult to overstate how important some of these tests can be. And, because of that, there's a huge ecosystem of test preparation built around all of these tests, trying to help applicants prepare for the exams. These usually involve practice exams, often with questions from older exams. However, what if you got questions that were appearing on current exams? Given how many people take these tests, would it really be that surprising that someone would tell others about some of the questions they received on the test? In the long run, it probably wouldn't make a huge difference in testing results since it's unlikely anyone would see all the questions they could get, let alone remember the correct answers (it would be easier to just study in general).

However, one website that did test preparation for the GMAT (needed for business school) not only was sued for copyright infringement because test takers passed on "live questions" to the site, but in winning the case, the creator of the GMAT, Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC) got access to the all of the site's computers, logs and records: meaning that it's now threatening to go after those who used the site, potentially getting them kicked out of school or having their degrees revoked. It's one thing to go after obvious "cheaters" but this is very much a gray area. These students were simply doing test prep, trying to practice with various questions. It's not as if they had the actual test itself beforehand. Would they similarly go after a friend who had taken the test who then mentions a couple questions he remembers to someone else? Furthermore, it seems really questionable to use copyright for this purpose. The test prep site wasn't "competing" with GMAC. If anything, it was driving more business to GMAC by helping people get ready to take the GMAT.

Filed Under: business school, cheating, copyright, gmat, test prep
Companies: gmac

Is An Online Study Group Cheating?

from the once-it's-on-facebook,-it-must-be dept

Vincent Clement writes in to let us know that that a student at Ryerson University in Toronto is facing expulsion for setting up an online study group for his chemistry class using Facebook. The school is saying it wasn't so much a study group as it was a place for 146 students to cheat and share answers (though, it's only blaming the student who ran the group). Students at the university are reasonably up in arms over the matter, as they don't see how it's any different than a traditional study group. Of course, the whole thing seems a little bit silly. As we discussed almost exactly a year ago, people working together to collaborate is an important skill in the real world, and what some people consider "cheating" these days seems a lot like the type of collaboration that kids are quite used to doing online, and which should serve them well later in life.

Filed Under: cheating, collaboration, college, facebook, online, ryerson university, study groups