I did not encourage or nudge my students to cheat, I did not do anything to make such cheating more likely or easier. As far as I can tell most of these people are not teachers of any kind, and none of them seemed to teach philosophy, ethics, or humanities. They suggested I should have just taken the copy of my test down and left it at that. I was accused of ‘entrapment’ and ‘honey-potting.’ More than a few seemed to think that my transgression was as bad or even worse than my students’. He disagrees:Īs far as I can tell, their argument seems to boil down to the claim that my actions were deceptive or dishonest. He had discussed it a little on Twitter, and while some people were, he says, “sympathetic and supportive,” others ( for example) expressed the view that what he did was itself unethical. Professor Merriam wanted to share what happened on Daily Nous to see what other people in philosophy made of the situation and the actions he took. I am in discussion with my Chair about exactly what response is appropriate for these students, but a zero on the final is the bare minimum, and an F in the class is likely for some, if not all of those who cheated.Īs you can probably imagine, this has been exceptionally stressful for me (I’m neither a forensic mathematician, nor a cop, so this work took a lot of time that I would have preferred to have spent grading final essays.) (I am considering that possibility for one student who is right ‘on the bubble’, but the rest are upwards of 1:1 billion chance, or more.) The remaining third either haven’t gotten back to me yet or have insisted on their innocence. About 2/3rds of them confessed right away or denied it at first and quickly changed their tune. I emailed these students telling them what I had done and what I found. When he confronted those students about this, most of them admitted they had cheated the consequences for their grades are still being determined: To my amazement, that threshold implies that 40 out of 96 students looked at and used the planted final for at least a critical mass of questions. (The highest match was 40 out of 45, which has a 1:10-Quintillion chance of being a coincidence.) That was my (admittedly somewhat arbitrary) threshold, and anyone who matched at least that many, I suspected of cheating. I ran a binomial analysis and found the likelihood that someone whose answers matched on 19 out of the 45 planted questions had about a 1:100 chance of doing so by coincidence. (The exact questions change every semester, depending on a number of factors.) As expected, nearly all students had at least a few wrong answers that matched statistically speaking this is likely given the number of questions. A total of 45 questions on this semester’s final were on the planted final. When my students turned in their finals this semester, I compared their answers with the wrong answers from the planted test. He ended up using the following standard: if there was no more than a 1 in 100 chance that the number of matching wrong answers a student gave was a coincidence, he counted them as having cheated, as he explains: When the students turned in their finals, and he noticed that many of the students had selected the “obviously wrong” answers from the planted version of the final, he had to decide how to distinguish the cheaters from those who merely made mistakes. My thinking was that anyone who gave a sufficient number of those same answers would be exposing themselves, not only as someone who cheated by looking up the final online, but who didn’t even pay enough attention in class to notice how wrong the answers were. (The final is 70-80 questions, all multiple choice, 5 options each.) Most of these answers were not just wrong, but obviously wrong to anyone who had paid attention in class. I decided to ‘poison the well’ by uploading a copy of my final with wrong answers. But finding the exam gave Merriam an idea. He emailed a request to Quizlet that they take down the exam, which they did. Ostensibly a study aid website, Quizlet allows users to upload materials to the site, such as exam questions and answers, and is one of many sites students use to cheat on their assignments. The story begins with him using Google to see if some of the questions on his final exam were online, and finding a copy of one of his previous final exams on the website Quizlet.
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