<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>protomyth</author><text>No, I really don&apos;t think this is actually cheating.  He handed out a test that, while claiming to be original, was actually from a standard bank provided by the publisher.  This isn&apos;t a SAT or GRE that is standardized by an organization or the U, it is a test in a class that he claimed to be the author of.&lt;p&gt;What really annoys me about this story is he is covering his laziness / inattentiveness to his class of paying people and having &quot;fun&quot; doing mathematical analysis of his class to prove &quot;cheating&quot; instead of spending time creating a test.  If he won&apos;t even put effort into original tests what effort does he really put into the class?  Are all his class lectures equally canned?  Would these students be better off with a video lecture series from the publisher and taking an online test?  What value and insights is he bringing to the lectures.  He sure isn&apos;t testing on those insights.</text><parent_chain><item><author>psyklic</author><text>Yes, it is really cheating. A publisher&apos;s test bank is very clearly not made for students to study from. The publishers warn students not to read them and try to make them inaccessible. In my experience, the professor almost always tells students what they can use to study from. Whether students can use past exams is almost always clarified - I wonder if a student asked in this case.&lt;p&gt;However, here the instructor has no way of knowing who cheated. He clearly made a mistake, knowing that using a test bank would make it easy to cheat. So, he should either let all the grades stand or he should point out the statistical anomaly and just make everyone take a new exam, which he did. I can&apos;t possibly see how students who didn&apos;t confess will be found out, especially if the exam was multiple choice!</text></item><item><author>gojomo</author><text>But was it really cheating? Some students have pointed out that the professor said repeatedly that he composed the tests himself. Given that, then plausibly, using example tests from other sources would be a legitimate preparation method. (For example, the SAT doesn&apos;t penalize people for reviewing lots of practice tests, because it&apos;s assumed the actual questions during a real test will be novel.)&lt;p&gt;See:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/21485811928/200-students-admit-to-cheating-exam-bigger-question-is-if-it-was-really-cheating-studying.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/21485811928/200-st...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now, it was probably common knowledge from prior semesters that this professor&apos;s exams were from the standard test bank. So those reviewing test bank questions may not have had pure motives in their study strategy. But it makes it less cut-and-dried, especially given that the students may have memorized (for example) 5 answers to potential questions for every 1 that happened to appear on the test. At some point, knowing all the answers to all potential questions &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; knowing the material... or else the whole idea of formulaic tests is bankrupt.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess</title><url>http://thoughtcatalog.com/2010/over-200-students-admit-to-cheating-on-test-after-professor-dedicates-lecture-to-proving-he-knows-they-cheated/</url></story>
<instructions>Your goal is to analyze the following comment and estimate how highly it will be upvoted by the Hacker News community.</instructions><comment><author>Estragon</author><text>To me, the morality of what they did is less interesting than the practical ethics of it.  The assessment they gamed by accessing the test bank is meant to provide feedback for how well they are acquiring the material.  Getting the answers from the test bank means they were more interested in gaming the system for the credential than they were in feedback about where they need to strengthen their understanding.  That suggests to me that they&apos;re not really interested in the course material, and I wouldn&apos;t be interested in working with any of them in any context which used that material.  That&apos;s an ethical failure.  It could be a failure of the course and the educational system, rather than of the students themselves, but it&apos;s a problem, no matter who you assign the blame to.</text><parent_chain><item><author>psyklic</author><text>Yes, it is really cheating. A publisher&apos;s test bank is very clearly not made for students to study from. The publishers warn students not to read them and try to make them inaccessible. In my experience, the professor almost always tells students what they can use to study from. Whether students can use past exams is almost always clarified - I wonder if a student asked in this case.&lt;p&gt;However, here the instructor has no way of knowing who cheated. He clearly made a mistake, knowing that using a test bank would make it easy to cheat. So, he should either let all the grades stand or he should point out the statistical anomaly and just make everyone take a new exam, which he did. I can&apos;t possibly see how students who didn&apos;t confess will be found out, especially if the exam was multiple choice!</text></item><item><author>gojomo</author><text>But was it really cheating? Some students have pointed out that the professor said repeatedly that he composed the tests himself. Given that, then plausibly, using example tests from other sources would be a legitimate preparation method. (For example, the SAT doesn&apos;t penalize people for reviewing lots of practice tests, because it&apos;s assumed the actual questions during a real test will be novel.)&lt;p&gt;See:&lt;p&gt;&lt;a href=&quot;http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/21485811928/200-students-admit-to-cheating-exam-bigger-question-is-if-it-was-really-cheating-studying.shtml&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/21485811928/200-st...&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;Now, it was probably common knowledge from prior semesters that this professor&apos;s exams were from the standard test bank. So those reviewing test bank questions may not have had pure motives in their study strategy. But it makes it less cut-and-dried, especially given that the students may have memorized (for example) 5 answers to potential questions for every 1 that happened to appear on the test. At some point, knowing all the answers to all potential questions &lt;i&gt;is&lt;/i&gt; knowing the material... or else the whole idea of formulaic tests is bankrupt.</text></item></parent_chain></comment><story><title>Prof Gives Lecture to Prove He Knows Students Cheated; Over 200 Students Confess</title><url>http://thoughtcatalog.com/2010/over-200-students-admit-to-cheating-on-test-after-professor-dedicates-lecture-to-proving-he-knows-they-cheated/</url></story>