Are Students Cheating or Being Prepared?

A recent article at the Telegraph reported the story of a professor who realized that more than a third of his class was cheating on tests. He recorded a video informing his students about the alleged cheating and told them that if they came forward and admitted their guilt, he would allow them to re-take the exam.

 

Surprisingly, around 200 students came forward and confessed to cheating. As you can imagine, this has led to much media attention being given to the idea of students cheating and how this generation doesn't respect the education process.

 

The thing is, when I read about it, I was concerned about what the professor considered cheating. It seems that the crime the students were guilty of was taking the sample test available online from Testbank. These tests are provided by the textbook publishers as sample tests, presumably for teachers. Anyone can take these sample tests, and they are the equivalent of taking the tests at the end of the chapter in the textbook. The cheating students didn't write down copies of the answer key and smuggle them into class, nor did they copy off of each other; all they did was use the resources available to them in order to prepare for the test.

 

So, my question is where is the line between being prepared and cheating? If the students used the sample tests as a guide for the information they should know, then where is the crime? That the teacher didn't bother to write his own test and instead chose to just copy the sample test from the textbook publisher seems more like cheating to me.

 

When teachers rely on exams that are pre-written and widely available as practice tests online, should the students who use those same tests in order to be prepared for the exam be considered cheaters, or should they be rewarded for being prepared?

 

What do you think? I would love to hear your thought in the comments.

 

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By Melissa Kennedy- Melissa is a 9 year blog veteran and a freelance writer, along with helping others find the job of their dreams, she enjoys computer geekery, raising a teenager, supporting her local library, writing about herself in the third person and working on her next novel.