I received an e-mail from a student yesterday and, with his permission, I am reprinting it here, followed by my response. The only editing I did was to remove the course name, to protect the professor’s identity. It’s not economics, in case you are wondering.

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Hey Dr. Switzer,

Given your recent brush with students who cheat, I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on what happened to me this week. I want to tell you about professors who cheat.

My professor gave our class a take-home midterm on Tuesday, due next week.  The midterm is 3 pages long and contains only 2 questions. I read through both of the questions and it was clear that the writing style used was not a product of my foreign professor’s vocabulary. So, I was curious where he got the question from.  I pulled a phrase out of the first question and put it in quotations and did a simple Google Search.  What shows up was the exact question from my take-home midterm, with all of the answers I need. Talk about a moral hazard.

This is a take-home midterm that we have 7 days to complete, and not an in-class midterm, where the circumstances of student access to information would be constrained. The fact that I can do a Google search and find the answers to half of my midterm, which according to the syllabus will equate to 20% of my grade for the entire course, seems ridiculous and unacceptable. It really reflects the lack of effort the professor has shown our class so far. He is 5 minutes late to class every day, clearly does not prepare his lectures, and always seems to be disconnected from our small, 10 person class. He knows nobody’s name. 

What really bothers me is that all he would have had to do to prevent any student from finding what I found, or to reduce the value of what a student might find, would be to simply change the data given in the sample. I mean, it was only 15 numerical observations. Had he changed the data, the variance related jargon we have to calculate in the question would be completely different than those given on the webpage. Even at that point, the webpage would still explain the procedure to calculate everything using about as direct of an example as one can get. If the professor really liked this question, all he would have had to do to prevent anything like this from happening would be rewrite the question in his own words (even just paraphrase it) and change the dataset just in case a student finds it. That way nobody will find it.

I’m having a hard time seeing how this is different than a student cheating, because I really feel like I have been cheated this semester. Finding the midterm question and answers online really put cap on it. When you combine the poor instruction the professor has given so far and general lack of interest he shows for the class, as a student, I’m genuinely frustrated. Also, class attendance is also mandatory. When the professor consistently shows up 5 minutes late, mandatory attendance doesn’t seem fair. 

I’d be curious to hear your opinion on the matter. Is this a case of teacher cheating? As a professor, what arguments can you make for either side of my professor’s actions?

Matt Nicklay

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My response to Matt:

I think this is an interesting situation, and there are actually a few different elements to your complaint, so I’ll break this up into parts a little bit.

I understand a student feeling cheated at poor instruction in the course. You (and the taxpayers) are paying for quality instruction, and when you don’t get it, you are justified in being upset. I’d like to give the professor the benefit of the doubt and say there might be something going on in his personal or professional life that is distracting him. I know that as I approach tenure and start working more on research, some of my teaching is slipping a little bit. I don’t like it, but sometimes it’s inevitable. Now, if he just doesn’t care, that’s another problem altogether.

Grading attendance and then showing up late — that’s a bit hypocritical. I don’t grade attendance, since this is college and I think you can choose to show up or not, and your grade will reflect your decisions enough without me assigning points for attendance. I can see your frustration with that also.

But on your more central point, I think I have to disagree with you. I really do think it’s different when a professor takes a question from another source vs. when a student plagiarizes a paper (the fact that I’m not calling it plagiarism when a professor does it with test questions reflects my opinion here, and I admit that).

If I write a good question, and a colleague of mine wants to use it, I have no problem whatsoever. In fact, I would be flattered. Personally, I have e-mailed former professors and asked them for midterm questions so that I could use them, and they always oblige me. I don’t think they expect me to actually give them credit on the exam, and nobody has ever asked for it. And I would not expect a colleague to cite me on the exam if he used my question. I would like to know he is using it and at least have the option to say no, even though I can’t imagine I would ever do that. I would like my colleague to acknowledge to me personally that he is thankful for the questions. I think that’s more than just a courtesy — I think that’s the appropriate thing to do. But citing me on the midterm? I don’t feel that is necessary.

If I actually cite the source of the question on the midterm, I create a whole new problem. If I tell students that I got this question from a specific former professor or a specific website, I have given my students information that they can use against me. Then they can go online and try to find those questions, knowing where I’m getting them. They might be able to have final exam questions in advance because they looked at all the questions from that professor they found online. And I don’t think I have to tell you I would have a major problem with that. It would also limit my ability to give take-home exams, something I do occasionally, as students could easily do exactly what you have done in your situation.

Admittedly, I’ve taken questions from other professors’ midterm exams, some from professors I have had and others from professors I have never had (usually other professors at the same school as the professor I had). I invariably have to tweak them one way or another because I find them either too difficult or too easy, or covering the material in a slightly different way than I presented it that semester. I would like to think that these professors would consider this flattery, and would give me permission were I to ask them, as all the ones I do ask seem to do. Should I send them an e-mail ahead of time and say, “I found your Spring 2003 midterm online and would like to use question #2 in my Industrial Organization class this year. May I have your permission?” Perhaps that would be the courteous thing to do. And when it’s a professor I know, I do it every time and they always say yes. I guess I’m just assuming that the other professors, whom I do not know, would say yes too, so I don’t bother asking because a) they don’t know me, b) I don’t want to bother them, and c) I would personally be fine with it if the roles were reversed. In talking to some of my colleagues, they seem to agree with me, but as of now it’s been a small number of people I’ve talked to about this.

Some questions I put on exams are from other textbooks on the subject. Should I cite those too? If I do, then students can find those books and use those questions to study for their future exams, giving some of them an unfair advantage.

Finally, I’m not sure the expectation of originality is the same for teachers as it is for students. As students, you are expected to learn the information and be able to explain it in your own words, as proof that you understand the material.  As professors, it is assumed that we already know the material. Should we really have to re-create the wheel and write all of our own questions to demonstrate that to your satisfaction? Should we be allowed to use the text banks provided with 99% of textbooks? (Is your problem that we don’t write our own questions or that we get them from a source that students can look up online? I guess I’m not 100% clear on that.) We still have to choose the questions that we feel are most appropriate to the way we have taught the class. When I create my weekly online assignments for my principles classes, I go through over 100 questions and pick the 10-15 I think are most appropriate to the way I teach the class. It’s time consuming, but I do it. If I picked them at random, would that mean I was cheating my students? Also, I have to admit that when I go question hunting on former professors’ web pages, the vast majority of the questions are not usable because I teach the material differently and emphasize different parts. Usually when I do that, it’s for a class that I am teaching for the first time, and I am just trying to get ideas for my own questions. It can take four or five hours, sometimes longer, so go through everything and craft what I think is a good exam. If I tried to write all my own questions from scratch for a course I’m teaching the first time, it would take many more hours, and that exam would probably not be good.

One more thing. In this day and age, if someone wants his students to have old exams but does not want the rest of the population to have it, he can use a course management system (WebCT, Blackboard, D2L) so only his students can access them. I guess I assume that if a professor makes them public, he’s okay with other people using them. In fact, I might put some of my material up on my profswitzer.com page for precisely this reason. I want other people to see what I do and get ideas, and if they use it, so much the better.

I hope you see that having to write your own exam questions is not always optimal and not always feasible. And I hope you see that citing the source on the exam itself introduces an additional problem whereby students can find the information. I understand your frustration with the class as a whole, and I think this might just be the straw that broke the camel’s back. But I’m not sure that what your professor has done on this exam is necessarily “cheating.”

I welcome your response and those of other students and professors.

Update 4:45pm: I didn’t even address the issue of this student looking at the question/answer online and whether using it is cheating, but it is discussed in the comments to this post.