Cheating on Finals

[Chemdude]

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So I was taking my last final today. I had bombed the midterm and needed to do well on the final (66% of the course) and as this thought cycled through my head I noticed something.

The girl at the end of the row was cheating off her neighbor, who was admittedly her friend. There was no seating chart and they strategically sat next to each other.

What would you have done?

Maybe I'll tell you what I did if this thread warrants a big enough discussion.

blackmailed her for sexual favors...

 

[MDhomieG]

So you just found out your best friend cheated on a test in medical school. You would just turn in him/her without a second thought? This issue is not as cut and dry as you are making it out to be.

so your best friend cheated on a test in medical school and you wouldn't do anything?

no i wouldn't turn him in without a second thought, but i'd do something about it. to say the least i d confront him about it

 

[Chemdude]

So you just found out your best friend cheated on a test in medical school. You would just turn in him/her without a second thought? This issue is not as cut and dry as you are making it out to be.

1 less person to compete with for that ROAD residency you have always wanted.

 

[vitaebellaa]

Sorry to turn this into story time but...
My gen chem final was in a large concert hall this year. The final was 4 hours long, at the very end of finals week, and I had busted my *** and pulled an all nighter for it (the test started at 1pm so it was a long day). Halfway through the test (right before my mind completely turned to mush) I noticed the girl in front of me was able to photocopies of every single lecture slide and practice problem. We were really spread out and the proctors were only guarding the door so she was able to keep her gigantic stack of papers without being detected.

To be honest, I had little desire to turn her in. But, at the time in my very sleep deprived state, I REALLY wanted to snap her head off and punt it down the aisle. She probably got an A, which isn't fair (but then again decapitation would not have been just either).

Sometimes I wonder if people really think it is worth risking being thrown out of school for a grade on a single test.

 

[deleted316655]

It definitely depends on the situation. I would have most likely done nothing because it isn't my business and I should only worry about myself. It would take a lot for me to go and talk to the person, much less the professor.

 

[Danlee07]

I would just go up to them after the test and say...

"Hey, nice cheating out there. You made it so obvious though. When I handed my test in I heard the TA talking to your professor (assuming TAs and your prof proctor the exams) telling him he caught you cheating. I heard this prof is a real stickler when it comes to cheating too, like he reports to university and tries to get kids kicked for academic integrity violation. You might want to go fess up within the next week before the prof reports it to the university and the paper work gets filed. Confessing looks a lot better than being slammed with an expulsion notice in a few weeks."

IE- Make all that **** up, just scare him into confessing when the prof really had no idea, and if he didn't confess he'd at least have a really awful, guilty next week or two.

I really don't care, I'm not going to go out of my way to "tattle" but I would go out of my way to at least talk to him and have fun with it.

and that's pretty much the biggest dick move ever

if they cheat so what...they can't cheat their way through their whole life..what, they're gonna copy other doctors' diagnosis?

 

[YouNeverKnow22]

stop snitchin', the streets is watchin'

 

[MediCynical]

I would just go up to them after the test and say...

"Hey, nice cheating out there. You made it so obvious though. When I handed my test in I heard the TA talking to your professor (assuming TAs and your prof proctor the exams) telling him he caught you cheating. I heard this prof is a real stickler when it comes to cheating too, like he reports to university and tries to get kids kicked for academic integrity violation. You might want to go fess up within the next week before the prof reports it to the university and the paper work gets filed. Confessing looks a lot better than being slammed with an expulsion notice in a few weeks."

IE- Make all that **** up, just scare him into confessing when the prof really had no idea, and if he didn't confess he'd at least have a really awful, guilty next week or two.

I really don't care, I'm not going to go out of my way to "tattle" but I would go out of my way to at least talk to him and have fun with it.

you are one cold mofo. i love it!

 

[Tatastrophy]

Hmm...thats a bit of a toughie... I absolutely DETEST cheaters. It completely undermines everything that you've worked for that this person is cheating and will probably pass/likely pass the test. Its a difficult situation to be in when you catch one because it could affect your relationship with classmates and professors. I get why some people are telling you to move on, and thats fine, but those who sound most vehement/aggressive about it anger me because it implies that honesty is wrong. I'm not saying that the world is sunshine and roses or anything, but morality is not dead for everyone.

Anyways, I've never caught anyone cheating cause I generally tend to keep to myself when testing, eyes on my own paper or quickly scanning the room for a TA or prof when I have a question. I also have this weird habit of always sitting on the edge and like bending over my paper. Basically, I don't give myself a chance to catch others and I don't let others cheat from me.

I am with you. I have the oddest test taking position: I can't sit on my butt...I always sit on my feet and crouch forward over my test. I am basically in my own little world and notice nothing. If I notice you are cheating...you can bet that I am not the only one.
Last semester during upper level(currrrrrrved) chem final...I noticed something odd going on. Realized as I was walking out that it was cheating. Turns out 3 other people saw it too in different stages (it was several people with a scheme). We told the prof about it.
My opinion on the matter is: I want my grade to be reflective of my performance in the class. As should they. I did not do anything wrong to get them in trouble, it was their choice to do something that they knew was wrong. I really don't give a crap what those people think of me...they are not my peers. *steps off soapbox*

 

[chman]

so your best friend cheated on a test in medical school and you wouldn't do anything?

no i wouldn't turn him in without a second thought, but i'd do something about it. to say the least i d confront him about it

I didn't say I would do nothing. I would confront the person for sure and give them a piece of my mind. I am simply saying that, as with most ethical debates, there is no clear right answer.

 

[Shaq]

just go clubbing

 

[TehDoc]

Love slave for 2 weeks or you're going to rat her out. Say you have HD pictures of her in the act, just in case.

 

[KTownGT]

If they were pretty--> Let them be, see if you can help them out.
If they were fatties/uglies/etc. --> Nark them out, and say one was sexually assaulting you.

/caseclosed


srs

 

[Cyradis]

Sorry to turn this into story time but...
My gen chem final was in a large concert hall this year. The final was 4 hours long, at the very end of finals week, and I had busted my *** and pulled an all nighter for it (the test started at 1pm so it was a long day). Halfway through the test (right before my mind completely turned to mush) I noticed the girl in front of me was able to photocopies of every single lecture slide and practice problem. We were really spread out and the proctors were only guarding the door so she was able to keep her gigantic stack of papers without being detected.

To be honest, I had little desire to turn her in. But, at the time in my very sleep deprived state, I REALLY wanted to snap her head off and punt it down the aisle. She probably got an A, which isn't fair (but then again decapitation would not have been just either).

Sometimes I wonder if people really think it is worth risking being thrown out of school for a grade on a single test.

Honestly if the test was well-written, lecture notes probably wouldn't have saved/helped her that much. In the course I TA'd (which obviously I have the most experience with in testing, any other course I've only been through the tests once =P) which I have to say was pretty well designed, the questions were all written so if you didn't understand what you were doing, having the lecture notes might get you an extra 10% or so on the test - no where near worth the consequences of being caught.

P.S. Random thing I always found funny. You get a sense for who potential cheaters are by who frantically glances at you (when you're proctoring) throughout the test. I also like to walk up/down the aisles, then randomly just walk up to the top of the hall/room and just sit down at the back. The students looking for you take about 30 seconds to forget that you're behind them and start copying/glancing at their notes (if they have them). Caught many people copying this way before (although if it's just people with wandering eyes looking at other people's tests and not something more overt, we can't do anything about it other than moving them to sit by themselves).

 

[SmokeyJunior]

Probably won't raise my hand and say "that guy is cheating"... would just concentrate on my exam. There was a situation in my IST class when i realized the guy behind me was cheating of me (very easy to do the way in that auditorium). I turned around looked at him basically said "*** off" with my eyes and leaned forward to block the test with my shoulders and kept working. If catch you cheating off someone I'd just hope you and the person allowing you to get caught... cheat off MY hard work and put me in danger?... helll no.

 

[smarttee88]

i would have told on them. probably with tears in my eyes as well. definitely would have thrown a temper tantrum yelling "it's not fair." i would have also made sure everyone knew i was a tattletale and not to mess with me. then everyone would think i was really cool and we would all smoke cigarettes. this is what i dream medical school is like.

Hehehe. I think I just peed on myself a little.

 

[Cayucos]

I'll share my full-proof cheating method. I did this in Spanish 3 my senior year in high school (and the method retired after graduation).

I recorded my voice going over terms and explained the meaning. I outlined chapters and chapters vocally and broke it down to about 10 mp3 files (each lasting a minute or so).

Put a small mp3 player (with the files on the internal memory of course) in your underwear. Have the earphones taped along your upper body and through your long-sleeve shirt. The earpiece will be just under your wrist. Set the volume perfectly to not be to loud (very very faint).

Now during the test just put your hand on the side of your head (which is a normal 'thinking pose').

It actually helps in college since I record notes nightly. I fall asleep with my headphones listening to myself - After a week or so I have everything memorized. If i forgot something usually my subconscious gets me the correct answer on exams.

 

[JoshuaGuit]

P.S. Random thing I always found funny. You get a sense for who potential cheaters are by who frantically glances at you (when you're proctoring) throughout the test. I also like to walk up/down the aisles, then randomly just walk up to the top of the hall/room and just sit down at the back. The students looking for you take about 30 seconds to forget that you're behind them and start copying/glancing at their notes (if they have them). Caught many people copying this way before (although if it's just people with wandering eyes looking at other people's tests and not something more overt, we can't do anything about it other than moving them to sit by themselves).

I would agree with you partially. I understand why some cheaters would have a tendency to do this, but it does not mean that all people who do this are going to cheat. I have a nervous tendency to keep looking up at TA's or the professor while i'm writing an exam, but I've never cheated. I don't know why I do it... just a force of habit.

 

[mirrorpair]

As a TA for a few years I've learned something: if you cheat, you'll likely get away with it. First off it is really hard to catch people cheating, especially when you have 300 people in a room. If someone is caught what usually happens (at least in my department) is that the professor will give an F for that exam but do nothing more; the funny thing is that they usually drop a midterm anyway so it has little or no effect. And most professors feel like it is impossible to gather enough evidence to pursue academic action. In my department, at least, the head lecturer is pretty soft when it comes to cheating; if a professor catches a cheater and confers with the head lecturer, he'll talk the professor down into doing nothing. I've heard, though, that our department is unusually soft on cheating so you probably shouldn't extrapolate too much.

The most common way of cheating is to copy answers off your neighbor; but when you're grading 300 exams it tends to be hard to see if two people have the exact same answers--especially since the each TA will grade only 1-2 problems for each of the exams. The only case where we can detect cheating is when the answer is so egregiously wrong that we joke about it then see the same egregiously wrong answer elsewhere.

Now if a student is actually caught and disciplined it isn't that bad; usually they'll take a seminar course and that will be that. I've even heard that the local med school where I'm at will ignore disciplinary actions for cheating if it happened in the first year or two.

 

[Cramster]

I don't think it is necessarily the duty of students to determine whether their peers are cheating. However, they would not be unjustified if they were to volunteer this information to test proctors or instructors.

I recall a certain classmate of mine who I watched cheat through organic chemistry, genetics, and molecular biology. When I saw her cheating through a molecular biology exam I had had enough. After the exam was over, and I had aced it, I was feeling rather generous. So instead of ratting her out I simply commented rather loudly to a peer that I thought it was amazing that the instructor was allowing such blatant cheating among students. Though nobody was "caught" it enhanced test proctor vigilance and put an end to cheating in that class.

This girl is matriculating to a certain midwest medical school. She probably won't be able to cheat there, I would hope, but I'd guess she wouldn't have to. Like gaining an acceptance at a high ranked undergrad, I would imagine that getting into medical school is the primary battle. After you are "in" they do everything to keep you from failing. At least this is how my premed advisor describes his son's experience at Jefferson.

 

[Cramster]

As a TA for a few years I've learned something: if you cheat, you'll likely get away with it. First off it is really hard to catch people cheating, especially when you have 300 people in a room. If someone is caught what usually happens (at least in my department) is that the professor will give an F for that exam but do nothing more;

This too has been my experience.

 

[Cyradis]

As a TA for a few years I've learned something: if you cheat, you'll likely get away with it. First off it is really hard to catch people cheating, especially when you have 300 people in a room. If someone is caught what usually happens (at least in my department) is that the professor will give an F for that exam but do nothing more; the funny thing is that they usually drop a midterm anyway so it has little or no effect. And most professors feel like it is impossible to gather enough evidence to pursue academic action. In my department, at least, the head lecturer is pretty soft when it comes to cheating; if a professor catches a cheater and confers with the head lecturer, he'll talk the professor down into doing nothing. I've heard, though, that our department is unusually soft on cheating so you probably shouldn't extrapolate too much.

The most common way of cheating is to copy answers off your neighbor; but when you're grading 300 exams it tends to be hard to see if two people have the exact same answers--especially since the each TA will grade only 1-2 problems for each of the exams. The only case where we can detect cheating is when the answer is so egregiously wrong that we joke about it then see the same egregiously wrong answer elsewhere.

Now if a student is actually caught and disciplined it isn't that bad; usually they'll take a seminar course and that will be that. I've even heard that the local med school where I'm at will ignore disciplinary actions for cheating if it happened in the first year or two.

I think your school is very different from mine =/. The course I TA is a first year course that just about everyone takes and several students fail with transcript notation every year. For us academic dishonesty isn't handled by the department - once you get past the prof it goes to the University's Ombuds office. In another course (where I was a student), the prof told us that a student was sent for removal from the program for plagiarizing a paper the term before (although obv not a testing situation there). Maybe academic dishonesty is just more heavily punished where I am?

There are people with really clever cheating methods and honestly, those won't get caught, but the vast majority of general cheaters probably will. My favorite ever is fairly well known at my university: a few students got really fancy wireless calculators (probably more advanced than just a calculator really) and were using them to talk to each other during the test. No idea how they got caught (this was before I went to the school), but led to an institution-wide policy of only one specific calculator model being allowed across campus for tests.

P.S. Cayucos: How on earth did you control which track was being played and scroll through them without being suspicious?

 

[shiftingmirage]

As a TA for a few years I've learned something: if you cheat, you'll likely get away with it. First off it is really hard to catch people cheating, especially when you have 300 people in a room. If someone is caught what usually happens (at least in my department) is that the professor will give an F for that exam but do nothing more; the funny thing is that they usually drop a midterm anyway so it has little or no effect. And most professors feel like it is impossible to gather enough evidence to pursue academic action. In my department, at least, the head lecturer is pretty soft when it comes to cheating; if a professor catches a cheater and confers with the head lecturer, he'll talk the professor down into doing nothing. I've heard, though, that our department is unusually soft on cheating so you probably shouldn't extrapolate too much.

I think here lies the problem, when people cheat, little gets done, so why stick your neck out anyways? I can understand how it is hard to show someone cheated on a test, but my college roommate was caught plagiarizing on a paper. Her punishment - she had to redo the assignment. No mark on her academic history, not even a zero for the assignment. I was also a TA and can attest that when students were caught plagiarizing in their lab reports, little was done. They would get a '0' for the section of the lab report that was copied, and that was it. When one has written documents to compare, I think you have all the proof one needs to show someone cheated, and yet nothing gets done with it. Why rat someone out when you know there wont be (significant) consequences? Most schools have a policy where cheating is grounds for failure of the course and even dismissal. But how often are those enforced?

 

[MDhomieG]

the fact is you're probably not the only one that notices the cheating, if you've noticed, then chances are other people noticed too and eventually the right people will notice. props to you for NOT cheating. It is true that cheating is so hard to catch and little is done about it, but the fact that you still decide not to cheat makes you that much better. Your the one thats busting his ass studying for every test and doing everything that you can to get a good grade the right way and if it matters I'm proud of you for not cheating. I used to have the same frustration when thinking about people who cheat, or even teacher's pet for that reason that seems to be getting ahead in the wrong way. Then i realize that I am that much happier because I m not one of them. Everything you do attests to your character, if you are an honest test taker, then you are a good person, don't associate yourself with cheaters or let them bother you. You have too much pride to take a grade you know you don't deserve. Next time, study harder, I dare you to do better than the cheater without cheating. To be honest though usually people who need to cheat are the ones that don't understand the material that well, unless the tests are purely fact based: which sciences tests rarely are. If anything you'll do better on the MCATs or in classes where the person can't find a way to cheat.

 

[Hurricane95]

My organic chem professor in undergrad had an interesting way of dealing with cheating on exams. She would intentionally curve and adjust scores to make the class average on every exam worth exactly a 50% (C). Because a grade of C is a death sentence for every premed, this would greatly discourage everyone from helping others on their tests, because the better the class collectively did as a whole, the worse your grade turned out to be. Exams were also very difficult, so to get a B and especially to get an A, you had to stand out and get at least a standard deviation above everyone else. There was always a perfect bell curve - about half the class got a C, several Ds, a few Fs, several Bs and a half dozen As. That way only the people who busted their ass studying got A's. Problem solved.

I wouldn't bother turning in anyone I saw cheating. Honestly, just because someone is copying answers from someone else doesn't mean they will do well. I've seen people copying from each other before and they both end up doing poorly because they're both stupid anyway and neither studied. You have no guarantee that the one being copied from has all the right answers. But I would always make sure to cover my stuff up, because there was no way in hell someone was going to freeload off my hard work. If I can give up going out for a week to study for an o-chem final, so can you.

 

[LuciusVorenus]

Want to know something crazy I heard from the TAs that some chem professors at my school do? They take the seating chart and color code it according to the grade received, As have their seat colored blue, Ds and Fs red etc (think of something like a heat map). Then they look to see if there's a concentration of a certain color in one spot so they know if they should go through and look through those tests for similar answers. Scary...
haha

 

[Beaker 11]

I had a professor give exam room and seat assignments before based on class ranking. He told us the assignments were random but I found out from one of the TAs a year later that he did it by rank.
In a different class, I found out that the professor recycled old exam questions and HW problem sets. After every exam or problem set due date, she would post the answers on the course website. Apparently there are search engines that you can use to look up old websites from previous semesters by the date they were updated. I ended up writing the professor an anonymous letter letting her know how students were accessing the old course websites.

 

[deleted316655]

Want to know something crazy I heard from the TAs that some chem professors at my school do? They take the seating chart and color code it according to the grade received, As have their seat colored blue, Ds and Fs red etc (think of something like a heat map). Then they look to see if there's a concentration of a certain color in one spot so they know if they should go through and look through those tests for similar answers. Scary...
haha

That is scary. The issue is that it can all just be a coincidence although the odds of that happening are highly unlikely.