Ethics Professor Baits Students into Cheating on Exam and 42% Do So

The Daily Nous, a website about philosophy, shares the story of Garret Merriam, a professor of philosophy at Sacramento State University. He caught many of his ethics students cheating on a final exam.

Students sometimes use the website Quizlet to cheat by uploading and sharing stolen copies of exams. Merriam shared with Quizlet a copy of his final exam for the Introduction to Ethics course, which consisted of multiple choice questions. But the copy that he uploaded had several wrong answers.

When Merriam graded the exams, he found that 40 of the 96 students turned in answers reflecting the often "obviously wrong" answers that he provided in the faulty answer key on Quizlet. He ran a statistical analysis and determined that the likelihood that these students had coincidentally marked their answer sheets according to his faulty key to be profoundly unlikely.

Merriam confronted the cheaters and about 2/3 of them admitted to the deed. Those who cheated will face a zero on the exam and possibly a F grade for the course.

Some people on Twitter are accusing Merriam of entrapment, but the professor is standing by his decision. The students knew that the university regards looking at copies of exams without a professor's permission is cheating. They will now face the consequences of their decisions.

-via Kottke | Photo: Pexels


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That's not cheating at all. That's "write your own notes out of your head." It sounds like you found a way to make them learn all the stuff they needed, while your students thought they were learning a shortcut!
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I used to teach at real estate school so students could pass their state and national exams. I taught them how to use a legal cheat sheet which involved lots of memorization. You made a long list of information you needed to learn, numbered the items and then proceeded to shorten the info per line over and over until you could look at a listed number and know what each numbered line stood for. When you went to take your tests you were allowed blank paper to use. As soon as the tests started you would take a blank sheet, number your list and write out the info. It was imperative you did this before opening your test booklet because the exams were written in a way that the first 5-10 questions could blow you out of the water and mess with your mind. Having your 'legal' cheat sheet let you have the perfect info for your qustions. A lot of work you say? Yep, but the standard passage rates for first time testers was 55%. ALL of my classes had an 85% passage rate. It worked but you had to really apply yourself to pass.
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Way back in the Ice Age when I was a student, I would occasionally find an exam question that was just plain wrong, and I would argue about it. Students who have the exam ahead of time and can't see SEVERAL of them were wrong have obviously not mastered the material at all. Or else they memorized the answer sequence instead of reading it, which seems just as difficult as learning the stuff in the first place.
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