Show us on the doll where the bad academia hurt you.
> If you don't understand anything in my comment, that's ok. I understand everything in yours, including most of the likely reasons that you can't understand anything in mine.
Ironic that you consider the teacher to have his head up his ass, then write something as obnoxious and condescending as this.
They're supposed to be studying the entire course, not just the questions that will be asked this particular time. And they were given perfectly good study materials for the course.
These students didn't want to study. They didn't want to learn all the answers to the questions that reasonably could have been on the test.
> These students didn't want to study. They didn't want to learn all the answers to the questions that reasonably could have been on the test.
Sorry, I have to reject these assumptions. One can imagine a stressed student who is attempting to learn from any available resource. This person getting confused by the poisoned material just exposes that they went against school policy by virtue of falling for the trick. There’s no argument for why their intentions were necessarily to avoid the work of learning.
Remove the professor’s assumption that they were adequately tricky with their question trap and perhaps it becomes more obvious. They may have instead just done something which confused an otherwise (if one disregards school policy) innocent student into believing false information.
That means they must have used the real study guide too. But despite doing that, they didn't notice any conflicts or otherwise find their way to the right answers for these questions?
I do mean an exceptional amount of stress. Some of the most stressed people I can recall encountering in my life are college students right before finals. I recognize the possibility that 2 of the 40 (really, in this case, just the 1 who’s “right on the bubble”) might be unjustly punished (expulsion) for a lapse in judgement. I also just mean to bring up the possibility; I don’t know what these students’ intentions were but I know what mine might have been.
(For what it’s worth, I don’t mean to be arguing the points the person you were responding to is arguing. Many of those are rather weak but there are stronger arguments for a similar conclusion.)
I'm going to rise to the bait on this one and pick apart every piece of this.
> I think it's bizarre and irrational to tell someone "you must know the answers to pass this test, but you're not allowed to study by looking up answers to questions you might find on the test, if you do that it's cheating".
Nobody said that. Ever.
> If a person learns the answer to a question that ends up on a final exam years later in their future, but they learned the answer to that question "the wrong way", are they still cheating? If my 10 year old stumbles on that site, reads a question and remembers it for the next 9 years... should he, on the first day of class confess to his professor that he learned the answer the wrong way so that he can be expelled for pre-emptive cheating?
No. Nobody claimed this was cheating. But nobody in the article did this. The professor planted the poisoned answers at the end of the class (we know this because the professor said that the questions varied from year to year).
But even if these answers had been posted in advance and someone had learned them 9 years prior, they were clearly in conflict with the material that was taught in the class and provided in the study guide. If you're attempting to pass a class without actually taking it, then yes, you're cheating. There's a process for that in most colleges.
And if you did learn the material ahead of time and there's a discrepancy with the professor, yes you should talk to them about it. If I learned that 2 + 2 is 4 and a professor started telling me it was 5, I'd be sure to have a conversation with them to avoid problems during the test, just like this.
> Now, you might argue that they put down wrong answers. And this is true. That happened because he deliberately contaminated the study materials with wrong answers. Who can blame students who learn the wrong facts when the professor himself is deliberately teaching them the wrong facts as a gotcha?
Again, not what happened. The professor posted wrong answers to a site known for providing cheating materials. The professor taught them the correct facts and provided a study guide with the correct facts. The official study materials were not contaminated.
And it was a take-home test. The students chose to use an unrelated resource that matched the format of the test instead of the study materials which they could literally have right next to them.
> If he wanted to encourage them to learn all the answers to all the questions (and not just those questions likely to be on a test), he could... just for instance... not do multiple choice. Or make sure he always has unique questions on his exams, every year (well, assuming there are ever more than 40 questions in a liberal arts class, imagine paying $1600/credit-hour for 4 months that only has 40 noteworthy questions).
The teacher actually mentions that the questions change from year to year due to various factors. I assume that some years they don't get to cover all of the material. Multiple choice is fine for this kind of thing, since it's almost made clear that there are other components to the students grade (the article mentioned that a zero on the final doesn't automatically mean an F in the class).
And it's a test. When have you ever taken a test that covered all of the material you learned in the class? All tests are a sample representation of all of the material, whether multiple choice or essay form.
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I left out a ton of your post that was intentionally inflammatory or just plain condescending.
It's also worth pointing out that 2/3 of the class admitted to cheating, one was on the fence, and the rest are still being determined. So a lot of your points end up being moot.
