But was it really cheating? Some students have pointed out that the professor said repeatedly that he composed the tests himself. Given that, then plausibly, using example tests from other sources would be a legitimate preparation method. (For example, the SAT doesn't penalize people for reviewing lots of practice tests, because it's assumed the actual questions during a real test will be novel.)
Now, it was probably common knowledge from prior semesters that this professor's exams were from the standard test bank. So those reviewing test bank questions may not have had pure motives in their study strategy. But it makes it less cut-and-dried, especially given that the students may have memorized (for example) 5 answers to potential questions for every 1 that happened to appear on the test. At some point, knowing all the answers to all potential questions is knowing the material... or else the whole idea of formulaic tests is bankrupt.
Yes, it is really cheating. A publisher's test bank is very clearly not made for students to study from. The publishers warn students not to read them and try to make them inaccessible. In my experience, the professor almost always tells students what they can use to study from. Whether students can use past exams is almost always clarified - I wonder if a student asked in this case.
However, here the instructor has no way of knowing who cheated. He clearly made a mistake, knowing that using a test bank would make it easy to cheat. So, he should either let all the grades stand or he should point out the statistical anomaly and just make everyone take a new exam, which he did. I can't possibly see how students who didn't confess will be found out, especially if the exam was multiple choice!
Even if you think it's fair game for students to have access to the test bank, at the point where they started to take the test and realized "uh-oh, I've seen every one of these questions before," they should have gone forward and admitted that they'd previously seen this material.
I agree that it's arguable before the fact that using the test bank is just studying. Once the students realized that they'd effectively gotten an advance copy of the test, deciding to benefit from it rather than admit it was unethical.
Another commenter here has already voiced the question about how so many HN commenters are apparently pro-cheating; I'll admit it's somewhat shocking to me as well. There is a (probably minority) group here that seems anti-higher education (or, said more fairly, anti-the present envisagement of higher education); is it possible that it's this bias showing through?
If this was such common knowledge amongst his students at UCF, then why was this the first time that the professor saw the bimodal distribution in the test scores? Why didn't his Summer class's test scores have the same distribution?
I think a lot of the comments in this thread are making assumptions about what the students did or didn't do, and might possibly be excusing some unethical behavior because of faulty assumptions.
So, if it was known in previous semesters that a test bank was used, why such a large statistical aberration this time around? It seems implausible that 1/3rd of the class just happened to memorise the answers accurately, and indeed, the distribution suggests that another factor was in play this time around.
I'd like to know how many problems the students expected to encounter verbatim or near-verbatim on the test.
Were they hoping to see a few identical or similar questions? That would seem to be the typical scenario when you're studying off old tests or, for that matter, the homework problem set. If any show up on the test, great. If a lot show up, you're lucky.
Or, did they think it likely that the studied material would make up half or more of the actual test?
At about 12:47 into the video he mentions that the makeup exam will be open 51 hours.
The duration of the test might mean that students can leave and come back (or even take the test at home). If that's the case and students are looking up the answers from the test bank (as opposed to memorizing them all ahead of time), then I'd definitely lean more towards it being cheating.
Unless the university has access to a students network traffic proving they had access to the test, there's no way to be sure who cheated. The fact that the professor trudges through threats and vagaries for a full 15 minutes only seems to underscore this.
On the contrary - there's a few things they can do. They could examine the difference in results between the two tests at the individual-student level, for example. Or, using the set of students who admit to their cheating as a training set, do a question-level analysis.
So, at least where I went to school (Georgia Tech) it is well known and accepted that students have word of basically every question that's ever been asked for any given course. Professors also commonly post previous exams as study guides for courses.
in all the universities I've seen in italy you always have access to the previous written exam tests for preparation.
For the oral part, when teachers have repetitive behavior, I've often see people collect datasets and use them for studying.
But the case seem different: the teacher in question actually took the tests from a given set and this set was known in advance.
This is silly of the teacher, not of the students.
Dartmouth College and Stanford Business School classes did. We often had old tests to study from. Professors need to work harder and think up new questions each year!
Many classes I've taken know this yet still don't bother to change the questions. It actually skews the playing field towards those that have a lot of connections at the university as their more likely to have access to more past exams as many lecturers deliberately avoid placing them online so they can be lazy.
It was the same in my university and every other university I know of. Previous exam questions are widely available for all popular courses.
It would be foolish to think otherwise. What's to stop a student to write down questions after taking an exam and pass on to his juniors? Since this cannot be prevented, the faculty must assume that all students have all previous questions as part of their study material.
Sometimes a professor knowingly reuses his old questions. In that case, the students should warn him: not for the professor, but for their own good. Because otherwise, they will be evaluated on less questions (since almost all students will answer old questions correctly whether they really know the subject or not).
The students made only one mistake here, and it was taking that course from this particular professor.
Same at the University of Michigan, where all previous exams are available, and tests are composed anew each year by the GSIs and professors (usually more the GSIs).
You have to think that if the professor really could identify the culprits he'd be limiting the retakes to them.
Maybe the real test here is for the students to realize that there is no "forensic analysis" in the world which could identify a cheater with 100% confidence except for the confession he is trying to bully out of them.
Let's say you are a student who was pretty sure that no conclusive evidence existed which proved that you had cheated. The optimal strategy might have been to, in writing, state that (1) you had not cheated but (2) had no way to prove your innocence. You cite your concern that, if you do not confess, you could end up with a failing grade or worse. So, as a practical matter, you have decided to falsely claim that you had cheated. After all, the only penalty (other than your professor never speaking to you again) is wasting four hours of your time in an ethics course.
Note that I did not say above whether or not you had actually cheated. Sadly, this fact is irrelevant with regard to strategy!
The solution, of course, is to have open-book, open-notes tests. Let the students bring any notes, books, etc.; anything but a communication device.
The questions need to be novel and challenging enough so that the students who understand the material can walk out in no time; the students who don't, can sit around flipping through their notes.
Of course, this approach requires the _professor_ to do a lot more work. (The few times I taught, I used this approach and always got rave or begrudging reviews).
So really, I have no sympathy for this professor if he adopted the "security through obscurity" approach (as in, the problem set wouldn't be accessible to students). I don't blame the students for doing what they did; in real life, don't we expect employees to use whatever resources they can to solve problems?
I might have missed something in the video, but if I were an innocent student, the benefit for me in falsely claiming I cheated far outweighs the risk in defending my innocence.
The choices as I see them are these, whether you're innocent or not: 1) say that you cheated, and you get to retake the test as though you never took it the first time -- you don't even fail the test! -- but you never get to ask this professor of a lecture with 600 students for a favor. 2) don't admit that you cheated, get caught in some dragnet based on pretty flawed statistical reasoning (or better yet, a witch-hunt), and "not graduate." 3) Best case scenario: You say nothing, don't get accused of anything, and you get the undying loyalty of the professor, though that loyalty fails at the first try, because it doesn't extend to you getting out of a test you by definition shouldn't have to take in the first place.
I'm a bit stunned that only 200 students "confessed."
I don't think it is really possible to keep a question bank secret. Some students tend to follow up with those who had taken the course last time, at least in my university. So if the question bank is voluminousenough, why not just make it open ?
Whats the worst that can happen, people might go through it and learn all the solutions. Well, let them, that's the purpose of the course anyways. But the question bank cant so small that it does not explore the full diversity of problems. And no one is claiming that all questions will be from the question-bank, throw in a few off question-bank odd-balls each year.
But how could they analyze the submissions to figure out (even approximately) who cheated who did not ? Apart from trawling their email and phone calls and wire taps that is....:-) I suspect part of the "forensics" was a bluff.
I can only guess that there are a few problems in the set that historically have a low probability of being solved correctly. So whoever solved those can be marked suspicious.
But a test will have only a few of those.
But it sure sucks to be in a course where the instructor is unaware of the problem that QB is available and you are unwilling to look up the QB. Particularly where the QB was particularly designed for the top percentile.
Your job as a teacher or as a presenter is to extend the available materials, and to provide me with insights that I might not gain from Googling existing materials.
Not to prevent me from accessing the available materials.
Not to control access to information.
If what I am learning from your teachings and from your tests and from other students can be entirely replaced by Googling through test banks, then you're not helping me advance.
If a presenter is reading off the slides?
If you're not utilizing what is available, whether Google or Khan Academy or iTunes classes or otherwise, you're not helping me make connections. To think. To research.
We see similar transitions arising in many human pursuits. In journalism. Booking travel. Financial markets. Programming. Music. And education. And in an earlier era of teaching, simply bringing calculators to a test.
Don't make me memorize. Make me think. Make me research.
It appears the professor has unwittingly also proved his teaching approach has failed.
"Your job as a teacher or as a presenter is to extend the available materials"
I'm puzzled by this. Let's say you teach basic physics or algebra... how are you supposed to "extend" the material, particularly testing material?
I always thought the benefits of having a teacher were:
1. Human contact
2. Ability to answer arbitrary questions in an instant
3. Ability to adapt lectures to the audience
4. Students in the presence of a room full of other people trying to learn the same thing at the same time
Those would all be great benefits even if the tests were all the same, administered in a standardized way, nationwide, by third-party proctors with third-party graders.
That's not to say that there's anything wrong with independent study, online courses, or ad-hoc groups of students learning together.
I just take issue with the idea that a teacher, in order to do their job, must also compose novel tests every year as though the new tests would somehow be better than all the other tests used over the years. If teaching honest students, it just doesn't sound like an efficient use of teaching resources to re-invent the wheel each time.
And there are objective benefits to using the same or similar tests from year to year. One is that you can see if your class is improving or lagging in specific areas compared with previous classes. That could help you hone your teaching over the years. Wow, I tried playing this game to illustrate economics, and these students scored way higher on the arbitrage questions than the previous 5 years! Or: "gee, I thought that group project might be good, but the test scores dropped this year".
This is definitely cheating, but there's an important lesson for the professor: if you care about cheating, don't be lazy. Write your own exam questions and change them often.
You can tell that this is the most exciting event in this professor's life in the past 20 years. Maybe he should try varying his material.
This guy seems like a crappy prof to me. He essentially got caught taking the lazy way out and is now acting surprised and trying to blame the students.
Outside of the United States, there are test standards called the GC(S)E "A" and "O" levels which are roughly equivalent to entrance exams for college/senior high respectively. Because these exams have been going on for DECADES, the examining body has basically given up on guarding these questions i.e. they are regarded to be in the "public domain". Enterprising publishers have called these collections of questions the "10 year series", which are exam questions from the previous decade. There is not a single person in this part of the world who does not own a copy when preparing for those exams.
A close relative teaches in a continuing-ed masters program. The first two or three times she taught the class, the grades on the midterm were OK, but reasonably distributed. This fall, they were uniformly excellent. She concluded that the students had copies of her exams from previous semesters, and rewrote the final.
As far as I know, it never occurred to her to tell the students off. Of course, these are twenty-somethings and probably a lot less susceptible to brow-beating.
I use to have a professor that actively encouraged us to review old tests, question banks, friends, anything we could get our hands on. Hell his tests were even open book/notes.
The tests were genuinely difficult. You could pass by looking at the material because some of the questions were just lecture examples with numbers changed. But to really ace the test you needed understanding of the material.
Im sorry but this is the education system FAILING its students.
1. fear mongering by the prof " FORENSICE ANALYSIS" and "LEGAL ACTION"
2. the SAME test for the last FIVE years?
3. some crap sob story about "what were the last 20 years about" ... how about you being a lazy ass professor?
I'm a 5th year PhD student who is teaching a large (80 student) section of a course, this is the 4th course I've taught. I've also taken plenty of exams as a student, and they are still fresh in mind.
I would want to know more information before I decided the students were cheating or not. The instructor refereed to an "exam room", and gave an hour range that the new exam could be taken. So the students are not all taking the exam at the same time, this makes it seem possible that the exam is online. If the exam is online, and the students can take it at home vs take it in a proctored room, that would change what would be cheating. If it were online at home (I don't think so from the video) then reviewing the test bank while taking the exam would be cheating. If not, then having seen a question before the exam may or may not be cheating, depending on HOW you saw the question.
If you did not acquire questions in an unethical way, then it's not cheating, it's just studying. As an instructor, I will sometimes put problems from the book onto my exam. If the students worked the problems before because they were studying hard, then good for them! I want my students to study, because it will help them learn. I also provide a sample exam with previous exam questions on it; I write most of my own questions and it's important for students to get used to my style. As a student, I had to take a written exam for my PhD. When I was studying for the exam I asked Professors for help, one of my Professors gave me some of his questions. I worked out every single question. He also submitted one of his existing questions to the exam and I recognized it when I was taking the exam. Cheating? No. I just got lucky (and worked my ass off).
If test questions are acquired by malicious means, or knowing that they are going to be on the exam, or are the test bank that is going to be used to make the exam. Then it is cheating. So if students knew that the questions came from a test bank, and downloaded the test bank (I'm sure it's on the web somewhere) to gain an advantage they cheated.
Finally, as an instructor. Writing a decent exam is surprisingly hard. My goal with an exam is two-fold, figure out how well the class as a whole is doing, and separate the students into their grade groups. The ideal exam has some problems that even the D students can answer (to separate them from the F's) and some problems (usually just 1 problem) that are a stretch for the A students. And a mix of medium problems for everyone. If you have too many easy problems, the grades will creep up and you won't separate students. If you have too many hard problems, the grades will creep down and you won't separate students. Writing an exam from scratch is very time consuming. I use my private test bank, and try to add 1 or 2 new questions to the bank when I'm writing each exam. I can understand (but don't agree with) an instructor pulling entirely from an existing bank to write an exam.
I hope I don't come off as flippant, but you're shooting for a PhD, the most advanced degree you can hold (if I'm not mistaken); isn't "surprisingly hard" kind of the name of the game? I'm sure if you ask students, many of them would say taking the test is "surprisingly hard," are shortcuts justified for them too? I'm sure a building contractor will tell you keeping track of and in compliance with environmental and safety regulations is hard, but we expect them to do it nonetheless, because that's his/her job!
Ultimately, whichever method allows the instructor to most effectively perform his or her job is best, and maybe that's question banks. Cases like this one are notable because they call into question the stance that using banks is as effective/more efficient.
[+] [-] gojomo|15 years ago|reply
See:
http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20101118/21485811928/200-st...
Now, it was probably common knowledge from prior semesters that this professor's exams were from the standard test bank. So those reviewing test bank questions may not have had pure motives in their study strategy. But it makes it less cut-and-dried, especially given that the students may have memorized (for example) 5 answers to potential questions for every 1 that happened to appear on the test. At some point, knowing all the answers to all potential questions is knowing the material... or else the whole idea of formulaic tests is bankrupt.
[+] [-] gacek|15 years ago|reply
questionable.
[+] [-] psyklic|15 years ago|reply
However, here the instructor has no way of knowing who cheated. He clearly made a mistake, knowing that using a test bank would make it easy to cheat. So, he should either let all the grades stand or he should point out the statistical anomaly and just make everyone take a new exam, which he did. I can't possibly see how students who didn't confess will be found out, especially if the exam was multiple choice!
[+] [-] kwantam|15 years ago|reply
I agree that it's arguable before the fact that using the test bank is just studying. Once the students realized that they'd effectively gotten an advance copy of the test, deciding to benefit from it rather than admit it was unethical.
Another commenter here has already voiced the question about how so many HN commenters are apparently pro-cheating; I'll admit it's somewhat shocking to me as well. There is a (probably minority) group here that seems anti-higher education (or, said more fairly, anti-the present envisagement of higher education); is it possible that it's this bias showing through?
[+] [-] brown9-2|15 years ago|reply
I think a lot of the comments in this thread are making assumptions about what the students did or didn't do, and might possibly be excusing some unethical behavior because of faulty assumptions.
[+] [-] warren_s|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jonhendry|15 years ago|reply
Were they hoping to see a few identical or similar questions? That would seem to be the typical scenario when you're studying off old tests or, for that matter, the homework problem set. If any show up on the test, great. If a lot show up, you're lucky.
Or, did they think it likely that the studied material would make up half or more of the actual test?
[+] [-] pohl|15 years ago|reply
How do you explain the bimodal distribution?
[+] [-] zacharypinter|15 years ago|reply
The duration of the test might mean that students can leave and come back (or even take the test at home). If that's the case and students are looking up the answers from the test bank (as opposed to memorizing them all ahead of time), then I'd definitely lean more towards it being cheating.
[+] [-] RiderOfGiraffes|15 years ago|reply
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1919562
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922049
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1922243 <- This has the most comments
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1923931
[+] [-] holdenc|15 years ago|reply
- Some students had an advance copy of the test
- The grade distribution indicates cheating
What the professor doesn't know:
- Who cheated
Unless the university has access to a students network traffic proving they had access to the test, there's no way to be sure who cheated. The fact that the professor trudges through threats and vagaries for a full 15 minutes only seems to underscore this.
[+] [-] bdonlan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eightbitman|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsolson|15 years ago|reply
Is this not common elsewhere?
[+] [-] riffraff|15 years ago|reply
But the case seem different: the teacher in question actually took the tests from a given set and this set was known in advance. This is silly of the teacher, not of the students.
[+] [-] melissamiranda|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] robryan|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oozcitak|15 years ago|reply
It would be foolish to think otherwise. What's to stop a student to write down questions after taking an exam and pass on to his juniors? Since this cannot be prevented, the faculty must assume that all students have all previous questions as part of their study material.
Sometimes a professor knowingly reuses his old questions. In that case, the students should warn him: not for the professor, but for their own good. Because otherwise, they will be evaluated on less questions (since almost all students will answer old questions correctly whether they really know the subject or not).
The students made only one mistake here, and it was taking that course from this particular professor.
[+] [-] noamsml|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jules|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dschobel|15 years ago|reply
Maybe the real test here is for the students to realize that there is no "forensic analysis" in the world which could identify a cheater with 100% confidence except for the confession he is trying to bully out of them.
[+] [-] sesqu|15 years ago|reply
http://www.innocenceproject.org/understand/False-Confessions...
[+] [-] ShabbyDoo|15 years ago|reply
Note that I did not say above whether or not you had actually cheated. Sadly, this fact is irrelevant with regard to strategy!
[+] [-] NHQ|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ajays|15 years ago|reply
Of course, this approach requires the _professor_ to do a lot more work. (The few times I taught, I used this approach and always got rave or begrudging reviews).
So really, I have no sympathy for this professor if he adopted the "security through obscurity" approach (as in, the problem set wouldn't be accessible to students). I don't blame the students for doing what they did; in real life, don't we expect employees to use whatever resources they can to solve problems?
[+] [-] kleinmatic|15 years ago|reply
The choices as I see them are these, whether you're innocent or not: 1) say that you cheated, and you get to retake the test as though you never took it the first time -- you don't even fail the test! -- but you never get to ask this professor of a lecture with 600 students for a favor. 2) don't admit that you cheated, get caught in some dragnet based on pretty flawed statistical reasoning (or better yet, a witch-hunt), and "not graduate." 3) Best case scenario: You say nothing, don't get accused of anything, and you get the undying loyalty of the professor, though that loyalty fails at the first try, because it doesn't extend to you getting out of a test you by definition shouldn't have to take in the first place.
I'm a bit stunned that only 200 students "confessed."
[+] [-] srean|15 years ago|reply
Whats the worst that can happen, people might go through it and learn all the solutions. Well, let them, that's the purpose of the course anyways. But the question bank cant so small that it does not explore the full diversity of problems. And no one is claiming that all questions will be from the question-bank, throw in a few off question-bank odd-balls each year.
But how could they analyze the submissions to figure out (even approximately) who cheated who did not ? Apart from trawling their email and phone calls and wire taps that is....:-) I suspect part of the "forensics" was a bluff.
I can only guess that there are a few problems in the set that historically have a low probability of being solved correctly. So whoever solved those can be marked suspicious. But a test will have only a few of those.
But it sure sucks to be in a course where the instructor is unaware of the problem that QB is available and you are unwilling to look up the QB. Particularly where the QB was particularly designed for the top percentile.
[+] [-] bhickey|15 years ago|reply
I agree. It sounds an awful lot like a bluff.
While in college I worked as a teaching assistant, on a few occasions me and my staff identified cheaters.
No one ever got caught by getting the right answer. Cheaters got caught when they had mistakes in common.
[+] [-] gsivil|15 years ago|reply
was posted just yesterday
[+] [-] Hoff|15 years ago|reply
Not to prevent me from accessing the available materials.
Not to control access to information.
If what I am learning from your teachings and from your tests and from other students can be entirely replaced by Googling through test banks, then you're not helping me advance.
If a presenter is reading off the slides?
If you're not utilizing what is available, whether Google or Khan Academy or iTunes classes or otherwise, you're not helping me make connections. To think. To research.
We see similar transitions arising in many human pursuits. In journalism. Booking travel. Financial markets. Programming. Music. And education. And in an earlier era of teaching, simply bringing calculators to a test.
Don't make me memorize. Make me think. Make me research.
It appears the professor has unwittingly also proved his teaching approach has failed.
[+] [-] jeff95350|15 years ago|reply
I'm puzzled by this. Let's say you teach basic physics or algebra... how are you supposed to "extend" the material, particularly testing material?
I always thought the benefits of having a teacher were: 1. Human contact 2. Ability to answer arbitrary questions in an instant 3. Ability to adapt lectures to the audience 4. Students in the presence of a room full of other people trying to learn the same thing at the same time
Those would all be great benefits even if the tests were all the same, administered in a standardized way, nationwide, by third-party proctors with third-party graders.
That's not to say that there's anything wrong with independent study, online courses, or ad-hoc groups of students learning together.
I just take issue with the idea that a teacher, in order to do their job, must also compose novel tests every year as though the new tests would somehow be better than all the other tests used over the years. If teaching honest students, it just doesn't sound like an efficient use of teaching resources to re-invent the wheel each time.
And there are objective benefits to using the same or similar tests from year to year. One is that you can see if your class is improving or lagging in specific areas compared with previous classes. That could help you hone your teaching over the years. Wow, I tried playing this game to illustrate economics, and these students scored way higher on the arbitrage questions than the previous 5 years! Or: "gee, I thought that group project might be good, but the test scores dropped this year".
[+] [-] xentronium|15 years ago|reply
While it is generally true that good students should not cheat, but using questions from standard question bank was somewhat asking for it :)
Nice and simple trick with distribution and disturbances, though.
[+] [-] rsobers|15 years ago|reply
You can tell that this is the most exciting event in this professor's life in the past 20 years. Maybe he should try varying his material.
[+] [-] kapitalx|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pmorici|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] brisance|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] julius_geezer|15 years ago|reply
As far as I know, it never occurred to her to tell the students off. Of course, these are twenty-somethings and probably a lot less susceptible to brow-beating.
[+] [-] jtchang|15 years ago|reply
The tests were genuinely difficult. You could pass by looking at the material because some of the questions were just lecture examples with numbers changed. But to really ace the test you needed understanding of the material.
[+] [-] unknown|15 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] delinquentme|15 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ltjohnson|15 years ago|reply
I would want to know more information before I decided the students were cheating or not. The instructor refereed to an "exam room", and gave an hour range that the new exam could be taken. So the students are not all taking the exam at the same time, this makes it seem possible that the exam is online. If the exam is online, and the students can take it at home vs take it in a proctored room, that would change what would be cheating. If it were online at home (I don't think so from the video) then reviewing the test bank while taking the exam would be cheating. If not, then having seen a question before the exam may or may not be cheating, depending on HOW you saw the question.
If you did not acquire questions in an unethical way, then it's not cheating, it's just studying. As an instructor, I will sometimes put problems from the book onto my exam. If the students worked the problems before because they were studying hard, then good for them! I want my students to study, because it will help them learn. I also provide a sample exam with previous exam questions on it; I write most of my own questions and it's important for students to get used to my style. As a student, I had to take a written exam for my PhD. When I was studying for the exam I asked Professors for help, one of my Professors gave me some of his questions. I worked out every single question. He also submitted one of his existing questions to the exam and I recognized it when I was taking the exam. Cheating? No. I just got lucky (and worked my ass off).
If test questions are acquired by malicious means, or knowing that they are going to be on the exam, or are the test bank that is going to be used to make the exam. Then it is cheating. So if students knew that the questions came from a test bank, and downloaded the test bank (I'm sure it's on the web somewhere) to gain an advantage they cheated.
Finally, as an instructor. Writing a decent exam is surprisingly hard. My goal with an exam is two-fold, figure out how well the class as a whole is doing, and separate the students into their grade groups. The ideal exam has some problems that even the D students can answer (to separate them from the F's) and some problems (usually just 1 problem) that are a stretch for the A students. And a mix of medium problems for everyone. If you have too many easy problems, the grades will creep up and you won't separate students. If you have too many hard problems, the grades will creep down and you won't separate students. Writing an exam from scratch is very time consuming. I use my private test bank, and try to add 1 or 2 new questions to the bank when I'm writing each exam. I can understand (but don't agree with) an instructor pulling entirely from an existing bank to write an exam.
[+] [-] sequoia|15 years ago|reply
I hope I don't come off as flippant, but you're shooting for a PhD, the most advanced degree you can hold (if I'm not mistaken); isn't "surprisingly hard" kind of the name of the game? I'm sure if you ask students, many of them would say taking the test is "surprisingly hard," are shortcuts justified for them too? I'm sure a building contractor will tell you keeping track of and in compliance with environmental and safety regulations is hard, but we expect them to do it nonetheless, because that's his/her job!
Ultimately, whichever method allows the instructor to most effectively perform his or her job is best, and maybe that's question banks. Cases like this one are notable because they call into question the stance that using banks is as effective/more efficient.
Good luck on your degree!