Friday, October 12, 2012

Pumpkin Eater.

Is using old exams to study cheating? I'd say when the professor provides them and the entire class has access, no. Another option would be if the professor specifically told you to use them as an outside source, even if he did not provide them. That was the case for the test we took today. Professor explicitly said in our review, "Use the old exams if you want to see what questions I ask. The two most recent ones are posted online and I know the others are floating around."

And the others most definitely are floating around. We have a class drop box which notes and resources are regularly uploaded to. The exams were posted for everyone by the previous classes, because they were given them as resources by the same professor.

So we've got the approval to use them. And go figure, the vast majority of concepts from the exam are repeated year to year with minor variations on a theme. Some questions are just the same old ones. There's only so many ways to ask about the concepts the professor wants you to know.

Despite the go ahead from the professor himself, I still got in a conversation today with a friend that felt that using the old exams was sketchy. It wasn't pure enough. He said it felt like cheating and felt un-honor code, which of course is all but saying...that it's cheating. The only way to go about studying for the class was the lecture slides and text book...and the two exams that were explicitly posted. Not the even older ones that had even less to do with the test we took today.

And besides, that's going to ruin people when they take the step 1 right? Because everyone totally doesn't forget everything in between now and then anyway before reviewing in a month long frenzy.

Totally.

I'm clearly on the other side of the fence. I found these exams to be immensely useful. Hitting back and forth between lectures to pick apart each question. Especially the wrong choices. I have to figure out WHY each one of these answers doesn't work. By the time I've worked through the question, I may have dived into notes from 3 different lectures. I really like practice questions because they allow me to think about the material in a different way than just slides. I get to play with it. So when ever practice questions are offered, I'm going to go for it. They keep me focused. On lectures. Lecture slides alone put me to sleep.

So I explained myself. I'm not sure why I felt obligated to. If I wanted to psychoanalyze myself, I'd it's because I have my own honor code ingrained in my identity. That his comment claiming using the exam resource=cheating was an indirect blow to my pride and identity. Thus, I had to soften it somehow. Or maybe I'm another self righteous twit of the world who just has a lot of opinions.

He did one of those things were you retract your statement half way. You know the kind of "you're ok because you actually studied the concepts behind the questions, but I'm sure the rest of the people didn't because they're lazy" sort of crap. Paraphrased of course.

Then he told me that he used an extensive stack of old exams in undergrad to pass biochem, held his fingers apart to show me how many inches thick, received form his fraternity. They had a file. Riiiiiiiight.

My response. "Oh yeah, I remember that class. I got a C."*
His: "I got an A."

FUH!

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*We went to the same undergrad. Not mentioned: I also had to bust my ass in a graduate level course to make up for that C. Barely scraped by with a B. Proof for the kiddies that a C or two does not kill your application. You can make it, and you will survive.

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