NSLog(); presents an interesting question: Have you ever cheated on a test? Helped someone cheat? Been caught?
Of course, as mentioned in the post, whether or not a person has cheated depends on how the act of cheating is defined. For some individuals, cheating is the mere act of gaining an unfair advantage. Of course, with that definition and most other definitions, the scrutiny is merely transferred to another word, such as ‘unfair’.
It’s hard to characterize the act of cheating. A common gray area is the act of ’selective studying’. If a student is able to legally obtain a teacher’s version of a textbook, knowing that his professor will base his exam upon it, and studies the textbook, can that be considered cheating? Or, for a more common example, is a student who programs equations into his calculator guilty of cheating, even though programmable calculators were explicitly allowed on the exam?
In my opinion, the first student did not cheat, but the second student did. The first student made use of available resources. It was as if he found a book in the library that made all the material clear to him. As to the second student, his action is equivalent to writing information on a small slip of paper and using it during the test. He definitely cheated.
However, in both cases, I believe that the professor should accept part of the blame. In the first case, the professor should have designed a comprehensive test, focusing upon material covered in lecture and in the textbook, rather than focusing upon only one source of information. Instead of taking questions out of a textbook and changing the numbers, professors need to design their own tests.
In the second case, the professor should have realized that students would have been tempted to program equations into their calculator. A solution would have been to design a test whose answers could not have been constructed from easily memorized information. For example, the professor could have provided a list of equations to students and focused upon conceptual questions rather than plug-n-chug problems.
Of course, I acknowledge that designing tests is a difficult process. Some professors are naturally good test designers, and others are just hopeless. As unworkable as it seems, I believe tests should be designed with the input of students. The level of difficulty should always be determined by the professor, but the format of the test should be determined by both the students and the professor.
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I would disagree with each. In the latter example, programmable calculators are explicitly allowed. The “borrowing” of a teacher’s textbook is not explicitly allowed. The latter seems far less offensive to me.
Well, the question becomes, “If it’s not explicitly allowed, are we to assume that it’s prohibited?”
The use of programmable calculators may have been allowed, but it was never stated that programming them with test information was also allowed. Often times, professors must allow programmable calculators to be used because it’s the only kind of calculator students have. As an engineering student at Berkeley, I can attest to the fact that almost nobody here uses a regular scientific calculator these days.
As to the example of “borrowing” a teacher’s textbook, let me present another example: a student was able to obtain copies of old problem sets and exams through archive.org. The documents had been publically posted on the web for a prior class, and the student decided to find them. Is that cheating? In each case the student made use of available resources.
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