A professor who throws old / graded tests in the trash is not intending for them to be handed back out to students, and thus those tests are not fair game. A professor who hands back old / graded tests to students – those are fair game for future students to study from, IMO, unless the professor and / or the college specifies otherwise.
All of the social sororities and fraternities kept a filing cabinet full of old exams, alphabetical by subject, when I was in college.
Best would be to make the old tests completely public – posted on the course or department web site for all to find to eliminate access differences.
As an IB student, if we didn’t have past questions and papers for exam practice, I don’t know what we’d use. The IBO has to create two exams a year, or four in the case of multiple-timezone subjects. Reusing questions anyway or tweaking only a few details would require a whole new level of laziness on the chief examiner’s part. To the IB’s credit, this rarely happens.
Honestly, a lot of people at my school cheat, but here are some of the classic versions:
- literally memorizing the test word for word (especially if you know you did well) and giving the questions (but not the answers) to other classes so they have time to work it out in their “own way”
- good old “I’m stretching and I need to look over my shoulder”
- literally finding a way onto online gradebooks (we have… a lot of hackers in my HS) and changing it there
some of the more creative ones:
- relying on the person next to you (as in you two assume roles and they are the “test taker” and you are the “cheater”) and having the “test taker” give nonverbal cues (coughing, hand gestures, sniffles etc.) to give answers on small MC quizzes
- having an inconspicuous object out on your desk, but putting a phone/cheat sheet in it, and the teacher can’t notice
- (sometimes people do this not to cheat, but just to use phones in class) taking out a calculator, removing and stowing away the calculator, and slipping a phone into the calculator case/shell and holding it at an angle so the teacher cannot see
- same concept as above, but this time with a decoy small book and a hole cut out in the middle to put your phone in.
I know our students cheat - both undergrads and grads. Some students have complained that others cheat using their phones, e.g. on bathroom breaks. We can’t really forbid them from bio breaks. Once I found an entire set of notes scribbled in pencil on a desk in an exam room - these were not for one of my classes, but I saw it since we use the same room for seminars. Now I walk through the room before exams to check for writing on the desks! I do my best to discourage cheating by:
- placing exam booklets face down on every other desk before allowing students into the room. This lets me space them out so it's a little tougher for them to read each other's work.
- forbidding all electronics. I tell them if I even see a phone or calculator, I will take their exam and only mark what has been completed. If I see them actually using one, they will automatically fail. I design my questions so all calculations are simple and can be done by hand.
- I assume the students have access to old exams since I return marked exams, so I aim for ~half the questions to be new, and the rest are minor modifications of questions recycled from the last 10+ years. It is just impossible for me to come up with all new questions for a 2+ hour exam every year, especially when some of the material is quite fundamental. I give the previous year's exam as the "practice exam" for the current year and don't recycle any of those questions.
- it triples my marking time, but I mark in red, and I write in the correct answers for anything that the students get wrong or don't provide an answer. This makes it hard for a student to write in a correct answer after the exams are returned and try to claim additional marks.
- I tell the students beforehand I will time their bathroom breaks during the exam. If a student leaves for a bio break, I go to their desk, make a show of looking at their name on their exam paper and then looking at my watch, go back to the front of the room, type in the name in an email to myself along with the time the student left as well as the time the student returns. I make it very obvious what I'm doing so that the other students see, and I've noticed that there are fewer bathroom breaks since I've started doing this. Also bathroom breaks are now never longer than 3-4 minutes.
This is an interesting thread - I know that some of my students still cheat so this is helping me think about whether there’s anything else I should be doing to discourage it.
What about students who are paid by other students to write their papers for them? I don’t think that could be detected, yet clearly it’s also cheating.
I have been told that the paper writing requirements/weighting of lower level courses have been reduced precisely because too many students were buying their papers anyhow.
Reading through these responses makes me want to weep for all the honest, hard-working kids who truly earn their grades.
Don’t weep for them! The honest, hard working kids who earn their grades are learning the material, growing their minds and developing the self esteem that comes from knowing their accomplishments are genuinely theirs.
And they will be able to inspire their kids to do the same someday.
<don’t weep="" for="" them!="" the="" honest,="" hard="" working="" kids="" who="" earn="" their="" grades="" are="" learning="" material,="" growing="" minds="" and="" developing="" self="" esteem="" that="" comes="" from="" knowing="" accomplishments="" genuinely="" theirs.=""></don’t>
Exactly. My D helps her peers on the exams. It really helps her self-esteem and group status. Remember, Hermione was helping Ron 
I teach in a STEM area. I used to hate grading homework - I could not tell who was doing it and learning from it, and who was just copying from someone else. Now I design my homework so I get different answers from each student. I ask them to go to a large public database and select a dataset with deposition identifier containing their initials. That’s their starting point for analysis and calculations. So … harder to copy because few students share the same initials, so most students start with a different dataset. The problem is now I hate grading homework because it takes so freaking long.
And I agree - don’t weep for the honest, hard-working students. At least in STEM - the ones who learn are the ones who actually get something done in the lab, and earn the glowing recommendation letters.
Exams - you do them new and risk errors, or you reuse them and reward people who have access to past semester’s exams, like in frats or athletes.
Homework to be turned in - electronic with randomized numbers is best, randomized question numbers can help. Assign a large homework set to be done, but give them different problems to turn in.
If something can be assigned one person at a time, that’s great, but yes, having to grade 20 or 30 or more separate homework assignments is rather annoying.
After exams are graded - give them a VERY short time to turn in for regrading. My favorite is 3 hours after the exam is returned, but certainly not two weeks which I have seen. They can take a photo of what they want regraded - this is great because you can zoom to see if they wrote over the red ink.
I cannot for the life of me understand why, in any HS or college class, someone would be allowed to have their phone handy. Is it so difficult to say “all backpacks, purses, and other personal belongings including cell phone at the front of the room”? Really?
Anyone who teaches and allows either cell phones or walks out of the room is itching for cheating. Which leads to many complaints.
Cheating with different sections having the same test - they have common courses for anything with multiple sections, or they take different tests. Even with “reusing” the same test with different numbers, rearranging the wording, putting in different options resulting in similar calculations, and making an easier problem more difficult and switching it out really don’t take too much time.
I know many instructors, mostly the highest level fully tenured professors, who reuse quizzes, tests, and project topics. I know many students who are frustrated by this. I know many students who joke with me “why can’t you give us the same test as last year’s students got?”. It takes more time to minimize cheating, but I can’t understand giving such a huge advantage to a select set of students.
(we won’t even BEGIN to talk about how this impacts adjuncts - adjuncts are paid by the contact hour, so if they have 3 hours of class per week, they have NO PAY for doing new quizzes and exams or grading homeworks. There is a huge incentive for them to reuse materials as much as possible. It really would be fairer to pay them by contact hour plus some hours for extra work - even paying for 3 contact hours plus 3 prep hours per week would alleviate the adjunct poverty situation.)
I have seen some classes announce that if a student requests an exam to be regraded, the instructors will regrade the entire exam. The implication is that grading errors could go both ways, and if the exam grading includes errors that cancel out (e.g. one grading error unfavorable to the student, but another favorable to the student), it is not worth asking for a regrade.
In one case in middle school, a teacher gave a test with some true/false questions. The morning sections saw that all of the answers were true. The afternoon sections got the same test, except that all of the true/false questions were changed to be false.
In my experience this generally means, “I’m going to give you the same grade or worse for having the nerve to ask for a regrade.” I’ll also say that I’ve never had a good professor with this policy.
Isn’t there an electronic scrambler that can prevent phones from working? I thought I had heard that one exists, but I don’t know details or price. At least it could prevent access to the internet but I don’t imagine it would keep folks from being able to view photos they took on their camera roll or “notes” they wrote on their phones.
I weep more for the dishonest lazy ones. I understand the anger at cheaters and have known some whose cheating continued well into corporate careers, but most of them are eventually caught, at least in STEM fields. DS tells me that 10 minutes into a tech internship/job interview (CS/Math), fakers are exposed.
In STEM fields, and for all I know in others also, if you faked your way in foundational courses, it’s difficult later. Those who could have done it honestly are caught with their pants down, and it’s sad because often their cheating was a maturation/impulsivity issue (ADHD hallmark) rather than a legit character flaw. No sympathy for the character flawed, but lots for the immature.
Ha, my dad has had that policy for many years, and he has won more teaching awards than you could imagine. It’s only fair - if you’re going to ask for a regrade, the entire test is up for a review.
The “technical interview” of CS jobs is a whole new can of worms. While I think it would be too tangential to discuss whether or not it’s a good system, even its defenders will acknowledge that the “technical problem pop quiz” has an obscenely large false negative rate. Look at [this article](http://www.unlimitednovelty.com/2011/12/can-you-solve-this-problem-for-me-on.html) for example.
Also, I know some remarkably good fakers.
I obviously don’t know whether or not he’s a good professor, so I won’t comment on that. However, that policy is pretty clearly meant to avoid having to do ANY regrades whatsoever by scaring off people who may or may not have a legitimate grievance. That’s being a bit of a jerk and generally a sign of good old fashioned professorial arrogance. Though to be fair, a lot of good professors have at least one or two policies that are simply terrible. For this specific issue, I have not seen any exceptions, thou admittedly I have very few data points for that policy.
Who asks for a regrade? It never occurred to me it was even possible.