Is Using Pre-Fab Exam Questions Grounds for Faculty Firing?

 

Six hundred students in Professor Richard Quinn's class at the University of Central Florida are retaking a mid-term exam after a cheating scandal (reported here, here and here, e.g.) that allegedly involved up to one-third of the class.   Professor Quinn informed the class that cheaters could turn themselves in, without sanctions, during a particular amnesty period.  The penalty?  The students must take a 4-hour ethics class.  

What exactly did the students do?  TechDirt describes it here.

The "cheating" was that students got their hands on the textbook publisher's "testbank" of questions. Many publishers have a testbank that professors can use as sample test questions. But watching Quinn's video, it became clear that in accusing his students of "cheating" he was really admitting that he wasn't actually writing his own tests, but merely pulling questions from a testbank.

The testbank is apparently available on commercial websites.  The students have posted a video (here) of the first day of class.  In that class,  Professor Quinn announced that he is responsible for "creating and administering the midterm and the final exam," and most certainly implies that he writes his own exam.  He says, "There's an opportunity that I may very well write a question that even I couldn't answer.  I try not to do that, but it happens from time to time, so if you have a question on the exams, come to me."

It is not obvious to me that the students cheated.  I would want to know more.  Had the professor told students not to look at outside materials?  Was the professor known for taking prior exam questions from this testbank?

A faculty should write a new exam every semester, unless the instructor informs students in advance that the instructor will be taking exam questions from a particular source (like a prior exam) that is available to all students on an equal basis.  How hard is that?  

 Surely writing a new exam is part of the baseline duty that we owe to our students. 

Comments

[Mccaco]

Most law professors give one exam. It is based on material that is imprecise and very facts sensitive. In fact that is why there are legal disputes -- people disagree. Giving a machine graded multiple choice exam is bad (and lazy) enough but trying to recycle is over the top.

[anonprof]

I agree with Mccaco and Bridget: write new exams every term and don't give out multiple choice exams. That way you both take into account the unique experience of that semester's students, make it almost impossible for them to cheat (at least as to specific fact scenarios of the test), and provide students with the opportunity to expostulate rather than try to find their responses in canned (and sometimes poorly drafted) answers.

As for the professor in the video, using test bank questions inevitably will lead some to cheat. The students who did it were merely opportunistic,which was not legitimate but certainly foreseeable. By doing statistical analyses there's no way he'll be certain which of them cheated. If I were any student's attorney I would definitely advise not to say anything incriminating. Now if a student already incriminated her- or himself by boasting to other students then to remain silent is further risk-taking behavior.

[Bruce Boyden]

Everyone has their own preferences, but to claim that multiple choice exams are objectively wrong is, well, objectively wrong.

[anony]

While in the abstract I agree with views expressed in the original post and some of the comments, I think that they fail to appreciate the realities of teaching large undergraduate survey courses.

In particular, undergraduate classes aren't like law school classes, where a professor can get by giving only one exam per semester. Undergrads expect (and oftentimes demand) to take 3-4 tests per term. In classes with 600+ students (like those apparently taught by Professor Quinn), grading would be an almost impossible task if each of those exams were entirely non-multiple choice (even with T.A. grading support). Indeed, undergraduates are not willing to wait 4-6 weeks to receive their grades from a single test.

I also disagree that reusing test questions over the course of multiple semesters is inherently wrong. Drafting good multiple choice questions is a much tougher task than one might think. Not only can it be difficult to gauge how challenging particular questions will prove to be for your class, but you will also inevitably miss some relevant ambiguity or interpretation of various questions the first time around. As a result, I've found that reusing and tweaking certain multiple choice questions ultimately provides for a better assessment than creating all new questions each semester. That having been said, I do believe that the reuse of test questions imposes an obligation on the professor to make sure that no copies of the exam leave his/her control, in order to prevent some students from obtaining an advantage. But that is easily accomplished with proper controls.