Professor Richard Quinn of University of Central Florida delivered this lecture after discovering that at least one-third of the class had cheated on a midterm exam.
The only question is the sanction. The result appears to be that everyone gets to retake the exam, including those students who cheated. Quinn intervened to prevent the students from being punished. I was with him on the whole lecture until the conclusion. The students will be required to take a four-hour ethics course if they chose to retake the exam. I am also a bit skeptical about the use of exam from “exam banks” or a publisher supplied exam. Such tests are often available publicly. You do not have these problems if you draft your own exams.
Jonathan Turley
I always think it is funny too that these schools sell texts books to students for hundreds of dollars and then buy them back for 10-20 percent of what it was purchased for. Only then to turn around and sell the book at full price. I paid 180 dollars for my used chemistry book and then was offered 20 dollars by the school to buy it back. We had to purchase syringes for O chem that the school sold for 55 dollars. When I went to the company website of the syringes that we had to buy they sold them for 6 dollars. How ethical is that?
Chris:
“I guess I don’t understand how this can be considered cheating if the information is made public.”
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Funny his statistics didn’t take that possibility into account.
I guess I don’t understand how this can be considered cheating if the information is made public. If the students obtained the information by stealing it then I agree it is cheating, but if the teacher is just being lazy and not writing his own exams then he can look in the mirror if he wants someone to blame.
Gyges more or less said part of what I was thinking – I was too disorganized a student to go to all the effort to do a decent job preparing to cheat on an exam, so I never bothered.
Another part of what I was thinking was rather snobby. I’m asking myself if this guy (who was lazy enough to use a pre-made exam) actually knows his stats well enough to accurately identify the cheaters.
OOOOHHH… Now I really have my snob-pinky raised… This guy is an instructor (not a professor, for what that’s worth) in the business school. He clearly was able to detect the cheating, but now I’m very skeptical that he really has the stats know-how to specifically identify the cheaters. I’m sure HE believes he can.
Also, I’m sorry to say that I am not at all surprised that business students would cheat (badly) on a large scale. After all, if your goal was to work hard in order to succeed in life based on being really good at some useful skill, you wouldn’t be a business major….
Some of my snobbish/biased views of business culture (stupid, lazy liars) is reinforced by Matt Taibbi’s recent reporting on a “rocket docket” court in Florida, intended to ram through as many (poorly documented) foreclosures as possible:
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/17390/232611
He describes simply appalling fraud before the court – forged documents full of careless errors and self contradictions being submitted to the court to support foreclosures. As bad as “robo-signing” was, falsifying a document so badly that it says that a note was sold before it was acquired is just insane – but it’s going on every day across the country.
Sisyphus Assist:
“A little bombastic there in your comments mespo…stay up all night dreaming up your post?”
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I’ve spent a lifetime “dreaming up” each of my posts.
Isabel:
“I disagree with Mespo’s tirade about this guy. You don’t have to be a statistician to see that something was off when you looked at the grade curve. Why insult the man?”
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Simply because I’ve had guys like this in the past. As many have mentioned, he uses a canned test and then complains that somebody caught him in his laziness. Once caught he overreacts and punishes everyone including the vast majority who didn’t cheat and who worked hard for their grade.
I actually had this happen to me in high school chemistry class when almost an entire class of graduating seniors was threatened with expulsion or denial of diploma by another conclusion-jumping gear head. He pronounced us all cheaters because during an open book exam we all got a formula wrong. His “statistical analysis” consisted of herding us all into the class room, giving us the third degree, and wondering how we all got the formula the same — and wrong. Turns out that his teacher’s edition text had the correct formula but our student editions, published a year earlier, had it wrong. By the way, his edition had a note the size of Texas stating the correction. He missed seeing it, he claimed.
In any event, I repeat that those performing judicial functions had best be judicious before proclaiming guilt or punishment. By the way, my claim to fame in high school was finding the correction note in his edition (which he left on the desk one day) and distributing copies on every wall I could find after he specifically told us his edition had no such note.
I didn’t like bullies or liars then either –regardless of station.
The vast majority of the time cheating on an exam takes way more work than just studying for it. Especially in huge lecture classes.
chris
1, November 24, 2010 at 1:22 pm
This isn’t cheating.
Or said another way, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman…”
Chris
I dare say most of us on this site have attended college and more than one of us, me included, found a way to cheat on some exam during that time. This IS cheating. Those students knew they were cheating, just as I did when I got a copy of an exam through a fraternity house’s files. To suggest that this amounts to “…try(ing) to find anything that will aid your studies…”. Is like Bush calling torture enhanced interrogation.
This isn’t cheating. Anyone who has attended college knows that when you give a shit about your grade you will try to find anything that will aid your studies. The fact that this teacher is too lazy to write his own exams is the problem.
My organic chemistry teacher never had a problem with us using his old exams that we got from other students to study from. He wasn’t lazy and wrote new exams every semester. I’m not sure what an exam bank is but I don’t see how this is cheating if the information can be publicly obtained with out stealing it or getting access to it fraudulently.
Isabel Darcy,
“Why punish the 2/3rds who didn’t cheat?”
To encourage the 1/3 to buy into the “snitch”/informant/SARS system that’s on the rise in this country…
(…SARS, as in “Suspicious Activity Reporting”)
Having said this, I don’t condone cheating.
I thought he said that he would be able to determine the actual cheaters with 100% accuracy eventually, but could only determine the identity of the cheaters with 95% accuracy as of the time of the lecture.
My guess would be that ultimately with people snitching on each other and a little forensic computer work they will be able to determine who cheated. Why not finish the investigation, determine who actually cheated and expell them? Why punish the 2/3rds who didn’t cheat?
I don’t get the ethics course alternative. They knew what they did is wrong. They don’t need an ethics course. The cheaters should just be thrown out.
I disagree with Mespo’s tirade about this guy. You don’t have to be a statistician to see that something was off when you looked at the grade curve. Why insult the man?
mespo,
Great post — I appreciate the additional context.
1L,
I had a situation like that when I took professional responsibility and ethics. There was a big fiasco because the professor apparently used some questions on the final from a publicly available source that some of the students in the class had used to study. The university ended up offering to convert letter grades to P/F for people who felt their grade may have been unfairly lowered by the curve in the class, and I presume the professor (an adjunct) was fired.
A little bombastic there in your comments mespo…stay up all night dreaming up your post?
Forest….err Mespo you are a god damn genius Gump!
And what Buddha said…
Part of me strongly sympathasizes with the students here. The professor was using a “canned” test from the textbook publisher that was readily available. He had previously, however, suggested that he was writing the test. If I were in that position, I would assume that using the canned tests as a study aid was perfectly permissible.
“I was with him on the whole lecture until the conclusion.”
Yep.
And what mespo said.
Some observations gleaned from experience defending these cases and this video:
This is a guy who’s personally offended that someone would dare cheat on his statistically perfect exam. This “bimodal analysis” foolishness and his maniacal forensic review of the overall data suggest a gear-head with his panties in a not.
The test data bank disclosure is the work of a properly offended student who didn’t cheat.
Punishing all for the wrong-doings of the few is the way of petty tyrant unable or unwilling to ferret out the guilty. If the forensic work is so conclusive, why punish everyone? To me, it casts doubt on the efficacy of the forensic work and our good professor’s actual faith in it.
His obsessive work to find the culprits; to slave-drive a new exam with the lab assistants; and his remarks to the dean that he could say with 95% certainty who cheated, and then ultimately his proclamation that he brokered a deal to save the day upon confession and penance in the ethics course, suggests a personality sorely in need of some counseling.
All in all, I would love to have the case of a student who didn’t cheat but now has to take the exam and the risk of a lower grade, or the student accused of cheating based solely on some statistical analysis. Were I the University I’d tread lightly here.
There’s a reason this guy is teaching at Central Florida, and why most untrained people are ill-suited to perform judicial functions.
You mean you can’t….but can people still take exams and show up in place of Jocks…..other words do jocks still get a free ride to graduation or are they still special…..
One of the most informative but useless classes I took at UT turned out to be a Jock class….only one paper one grade….I wonder who wrote theirs…I know who wrote mine….and yes…when able I did go to class….those were the days….