Some 200 of the 600 students in a University of Central Florida class hit with a cheating scandal have confessed that they benefited from access to test questions in advance of a midterm examination, according to The Orlando Sentinel. But the test questions may have been exceptionally easy to find online because, the Sentinel reported, the professor teaching the business course did not devise his own exam but used test questions provided by the publisher of the textbook used in the class—questions that might readily be posted online. The students who admitted cheating will be required to attend an ethics class, but were permitted to take a different version of the midterm. Students who cheated but did not confess may be expelled, the university said last week.
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I sympathize. I once taught a hybrid course where students extensively used e-resources from the textbook publisher. About three weeks into teaching, I discovered that all the students had access into question testbanks. I sure turned that function off fast!
Who uses textbook publishers’ questions? Really!
The instructor being so lazy as to skip developing a new test. Ouch. Students and professors cheat their own ways.
Is it cheating when students simply look up something that the publisher put on the web? I’m not sure it is.
How is it cheating for students to use openly available, online test items offered by the publisher? A professor who would ONLY use such items would be lazy, but a professor who would PROHIBIT use of such items would be intellectually bankrupt. The problem here is definitely not with the students.
I see two possibilities with these new e-learning tools, for how this problem may have arisen.
1. The *instructor* testbanks were leaked to students
2. The instructor got the testbanks confused. “Official” testbanks are normally not accessible from student accounts, but “demo tests” most certainly are accessible.
It sounds like the *instructor-only* testbanks were leaked, which is most certainly an ethics breach.
There are ethical uses for on-line test banks. An instructor may direct students to a text bank to help them with their own self-assessment of learning and retention of basic data. However, most test banks do not test higher-order skills and therefore should be of limited value for comprehensive mid-term exams.
It needs to be clarified how the tests were made available online. I often use publisher’s tests that are questions suited specifically for the information in the text. Typically there are about 50 open-ended questions, 50 multiple-choice (which I don’t use) 50 True-False (which I don’t use) and 20 short answer questions. I tell my students that I will be using these questions. With a mid-term, that gives them about 300 to 400 questions to “know” are coming. Okay. Not only are the questions randomly generated; but, they are randomly generated for each student. So, naysayers, call it lazy. The students need to cover everything and can’t “cheat” off of each other. As far as the value for testing higher-order skills, there are a number of other assignments to test their knowledge, their critical thinking, and their critical writing.
This is sad on so many levels. Having a Ph.D. once meant you would be developing your own course materials. Next we saw the rise of text books, homogenizing course materials according to some “expert” in a given field. Now the publishers provide test banks, presumably so any adjunct can conduct a given class with minimal effort. ugacampuslife not only appears to be enslaved to the mentality that a text book is the better judge of course content, but apparently is happy to go with whatever a computer program produces from a publishers canned set of test questions, quietly ceding it will do the better job of determininted if the students have developed “higer-order” skills. Perhaps the on-line advocates have it right … why bother having classes conducted by learned instructors when all one has to do is regurgitate material produced by others who presumably are of greater capability?
Is there any serious prof out there who uses textbook publishers’ test questions? I suppose there must be. One more reason for me to be glad I’ve retired for if, as a former chairperson, I had to adjudicate something like this, I’m afraid I would feel constrained to come down a lot harder on the instructor than on the students.
If everything in the article is true, then this amounts to students looking at a professor’s old tests as study material. I have seen this before when I was a TA where a lazy-a$$ professor had questions on their test that were from on old, publicly-available test.
I sympathize with the students on this one.
I presume that the people whining about “lazy professors” must either not teach very much themselves, or not teach at *modern* public or for-profit colleges at all. That or they teach very few class types. “Ivory tower” comments such as these reflect poorly on the profession.
A typical teaching load nowadays is 15-18 credit hours per semester (at most schools), class sizes are at the highest average size in U.S. history, ditto for assessment bureaucracy. New textbooks are popping out every 2-3 years.
The previous poster who panned adjuncts as being the ones most responsible for using test banks should take a look at entering assistant professors at R1′s and R2′s as well. If anything, the research professors use test banks *more* than the community college adjuncts. The reason is obvious, it saves a great deal of prep time and effort (that is not useful for tenure requirements).
Publisher testbanks are not canned garbage. They are typically put together by teams of highly experienced, dedicated, professional educators. You know, the ones that win all those national teaching awards and stuff. Most of us that have *actually used* publisher testbanks are fully aware of this. The questions are, if anything, better than anything most of us would ever come up with on our own. Heck, the Bloom’s Taxonomy ratios (and other learning types) are often even incorporated into them.
All that said, many of do NOT use testbank questions directly. Rather, we may use (some) questions as templates, and create modified versions to best suit our own classes. It has been my experience that in most cases, instructors have to *dumb down* the testbank questions considerably!
First of all, I would like to know if the students had access to “instructor” resources. Most test banks are protected in this way. I DO use testbank questions but personally read each question in the test bank for accuracy and to see if it is pertainent. I then load the questions into Blackboard which randomizes the test for EACH student. I will add that I also put in 3-5 short answer, critical thinking questions on each exam which are also ramdomized. If the students illegally got access to the instructor resources, then it’s cheating, if they were given access, it’s NOT. What instructor would give this type of access to students? The Student resources are usually good, but students don’t make use of them enough.
I at least find it refereshing that the school considered this a “scandal”. Frankly, this has become so much business as usual elsewhere. Bravo U of Central Florida.
Anyone who uses test bank questions verbatim on an exam, whether they are supposed to be accessible to students or not, is asking for trouble. Ditto for using your own old exam questions without changing them. The people in my department routinely teach classes with hundreds of students in them and would never be stupid enough to do this. The students at UCF were wrong, but it is the instructor’s laziness that made their cheating possible, so he needs to take some responsibility for what happened.
One of my students complained that it is impossible to cheat or cram for my tests. I make up my own questions and they are application oriented essays. I considered the complaint a compliment, and cannot imagine using canned mulple choice, T/F, etc tests that students cram for the night before and brain dump fiv emintes after the test. Anyone can use a test bank, educators need to be more creative.
I for one, in one course I taught used the publisher’s test bank. I wrote it. I made sure that there were multiple copies in the university library. I encouraged my students to use it in their studying and said that the majority of questions (if not all of them)would come from the test bank.
There were approximately 100 questions for each chapter of the text and I used perhaps 10-20 questions from any chapter on an exam.
The answers on the exam were scrambled from those in the test bank book.
Would I do this in every course? Absolutely not. For the course in question and the students in question it was an appropriate pedagogical strategy. Was I being intellectually lazy? I think not.
Were the students who used the test bank books in the library cheating? Absolutely not. Were the grades unusually high compared to other courses where I used different testing strategies? No.
Although I take a very strict view towards cheating. Unless the test bank or other source material which students used was clearly identified as “the test in question” the students were not cheating but using file material similar to that professors put in libraries, and which fraternities and sororities routinely keep.
Those familiar with the NYS Regents exam, know that review books containing the old exams are a standard tool which students use to prepare for the exams they will be taking. The questions on the Regents exams have more than a little “recycling” from one exam to another.
I refer readers here to the article in “Inside Higher Education” which is much more complete and lays out the various positions which can be taken with respect to this incident.
From afar, my view is that if the students knew that they had the actual exam they were cheating. If they thought it was study material they were not.
However, some of the attitudes expressed by students, attitudes such as “everybody cheats” are troubling indeed.
I find it hard to believe that so many comments take blame away from the students. The alleged laziness of the professor has no direct connection to the behavior of the students. By the same reasoning, if the prof. accidentally left the exam on a table or in a public folder online, it would be okay for the students to use it. Can so many posters really believe that student behavior in this case is ethical and/or blameless? The argument that it isn’t cheating because the material was available on the web doesn’t cut it. Simply because something is available doesn’t remove a student’s ethical responsibility. If they are ‘test questions’ for your exam, then you are either a liar or a fool if you claim that you aren’t cheating by using them.
Ok, how about this one then? When I was taking introductory Chemistry back in the Paleolithic era, it quickly became obvious that the instructor’s exam questions were copies of those found in the textbook exercises. So, if you wanted to do well on the exams, you just made sure you could do all the exercises! He used the questions verbatim, so those who couldn’t work out problems from first principles tried to remember the exact answers from their study group.
None of the questions on the exam were ever those assigned as homework, so no one could even be accused of collaboration (as we were expected to do the homework on our own).
As the instructor was egregiously incompetent, I never had any qualms about using his laziness to my advantage. And by doing all the text problems, I think I came up with a pretty good understanding of the principles. I never thought there was an ethical, moral, or honor code issue.
Whaddya say?