<p>If tests started and stopped at exactly the same time - I am thinking this is either a computer glitch or deliberate hacking on someone’s part.</p>
<p>^^^I have done several online classes and all the online homework, quizzes and tests have been randomly mixed where for multiple choice the correct responses on two different tests would be different letters or for questions requiring calculations and actual input the problem might be the same but all the data numbers are completely different.</p>
<p>Could someone describe what a WF is? I’m unfamiliar with the term.</p>
<p>withdraw failing</p>
<p>We can all wonder, and we are, if the cheating occurred. I admit the statistical evidence is compelling but even compelling evidence leaves room for doubt. That is why I’ve always seen these cases resolved with makeup tests.</p>
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<p>It makes me so mad that the professor would hide behind this mumbo-jumbo. He’s not being fair to your son. He’s not giving him any opportunity to defend himself. He has decided your son is guilty and he is not even considering there is any possibility that the reality might be otherwise.</p>
<p>This sounds like a truly bad teacher but I have found it is usually impossible to deal with people who are unreasonable. There is a case to be made at this point for minimizing the damage to your son by taking the W or WF, (not sure which is was).</p>
<p>WF is worse because it says you were failing the class when you withdrew.</p>
<p>At the schools I am familiar with you can get a W if you withdraw before a certain date. After that date you have to get the teachers permission to withdraw and they can allow it but give you a WF, WP (meaning you were passing and withdrew) or just a W.</p>
<p>I think that the issue of being fair to other students is that the material on the final is now known so that anyone taking it after everyone else took it would have the potential advantage of talking to someone that took the test or that received the graded paper back.</p>
<p>I wonder about the purpose of the WF. At son’s school, they have W which has to be done shortly after midterms, and F. The WF appears to be viewed as the same as an F. With a W, you never know. It could be a bunch of things.</p>
<p>Okay, they have given me a couple of extra days to decide what to do. I need someone to look at this information and give me your opinion based on this. The new information includes percentages of other students who picked the same answers. As I stated earlier, there is only one other child that takes this test with them, however, there are other students at the school that take it at a different time. I’m not sure if he is using these percentages from my son’s class of 3 students, the total high school students enrolled (which I know is not many), or the course overall. I spoke with the dean again today, who informed me that more than likely a WF would not be reversed because the deadline for that would have been March. </p>
<p>HIS STATEMENT:
Our accusation is based solely on the pattern of answers that your son and another student at the school gave on several tests.</p>
<p>On one test (Nervous System II) they each scored 23/30.
On that test, they got the same 7 wrong.
On the 7 questions they got wrong, they chose the same wrong answer on 7/7.
Those wrong answers were selected by the following percentages of students in the class: 6, 7, 17, 27, 30, 33, 48.</p>
<p>In other words, on that test, they gave the exact same answers to every single question, including the same 7 questions that they got wrong, and including some wrong answers that were selected by very few students.</p>
<p>The similar pattern of wrong answers on that test alone would have been sufficient for the judgment that an Academic Integrity Violation occurred.</p>
<p>On another test (Sensation and Perception)
One student got 8 wrong.
The other student got 9 wrong, including all 8 that the first student got wrong.
Of those 8, they gave the same wrong answer on 7 of them. On the 8th question, one of the students gave no answer at all.
The 7 wrong answers that they both gave were selected by the following percentages of students in the class:
2, 12, 16, 18, 31, 37, 41.</p>
<p>On a third test, they each got 6 questions wrong.
Five of the six were the same questions.
For those five, they gave the same wrong answer on all five.
The percentage of students in the class who chose these answers was:
8, 15, 24, 26, 32.</p>
<p>The old joke is the multiple choice exams are really multiple guess.</p>
<p>Let’s say the two students didn’t know the answers on the 19 problems they got wrong, and guessed randomly at the answer. We all know that some guessing is usually done on multiple choice tests. The odds of guessing exactly the same on 19 4-question multiple choice problems is roughly 1 in 274,877,906,944.</p>
<p>But maybe they were able to weed out the outlyers and only guessed between two. Suppose they knew which ones were the distractors but didn’t know which 2 were correct. The odds are then 1 in 524,288 that they would have the same answers for 19 problems. (This assumes they both thought that the same two answers were distractors, which isn’t terribly likely.)</p>
<p>Then we have the information that the other student did poorly when you S was not present. That confirms that the scores were not random.</p>
<p>I don’t see anyway that cheating could not have taken place. But what we don’t know is who was involved and whether your S was a willing participant or innocent bystander. Your ability to fight it depends on the ability of your S to prove that he had no involvement and he was an innocent bystander.</p>
<p>He would have to use a fairly large sample size to get those percentage numbers. I’d take the WF.</p>
<p>Giving out the percentage numbers rules out cheating with a third person.</p>
<p>The odds of this happening without some kind of cheating is very, very remote as bigtrees indicates.</p>
<p>1) First of all, the percentages are out of at least 100, because if you look at the percentages, in some cases they differ by only 1. I’m guessing it’s the whole class. </p>
<p>2, 6, 7, 8, 12, 15, 16, 17, 18, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31, 33, 32, 37, 41, 48.</p>
<p>2) A better statistician than me can probably figure out the probability that an academic integrity violation occurred, but it’s clearly more likely than not that one occurred. I don’t think that arguing that it didn’t occur is going to bear fruit. </p>
<p>3) However, there is little to no evidence to differentiate two very different possibilities: a) that your son engaged in an academic integrity violation or b) that he was merely an unwitting victim. Since these are so different, I would think that the professor would need to provide evidence for (a), which he doesn’t have. Furthermore, the proctor backs him up. However, given that it’s likely that an academic violation occurred, I’m not sure how much credibility the proctor has. The easiest thing for the professor to do is to say that the test was most likely compromised and make your son take different tests. Another possibility is for the professor to offer an incomplete so that your son can take those tests the next time the course is offered. </p>
<p>In the meantime, you need to look for evidence that proves that your son was a unwitting victim. Have you seen the room, can you access (perhaps for a fee) the phone logs of your son’s phone during the exam times. Is there a network in the room that a kid can hack and can monitor someone else’s screen? Do the computers run Remote Assistance or something like that? How hard would it be to hack the computers so that the other kid can see your son’s every keystroke. Maybe there is a log file somewhere on the computers that recorded a remote access.</p>
<p>I don’t think that you should take the WF. I think that you could argue for at a minimum, an incomplete.</p>
<p>That is very strong evidence of cheating. I am wondering what the proctor was doing. That would be one person I would be very unhappy with.</p>
<p>From the percentages you listed, there are over 50 students taking these tests, could be a lot more.</p>
<p>A WF can almost certainly be changed to a W with some additional bureaucracy. I would guess it requires a few willing signatures (e.g., professor, chair, dean).</p>
<p>The order of the questions and the choices for each question should be randomized to help prevent this sort of thing, but that doesn’t absolve for the cheating.</p>
<p>This won’t be popular, but I’m going to defend the professor here. I’m a professor myself and know that a huge amount of cheating goes unpunished because 1. many professors just don’t want to take the significant amount of time required to deal with cheating cases–no one gets tenure or a raise because they prosecuted cheaters–and 2. even when you know darn well that cheating happened, a lot of the time, there just isn’t enough concrete evidence. From what we know now, the situation is certainly suspicious that cheating took place on multiple occasions and it looks to me like the professor is doing the responsible thing by following up on it. There is no indication that he/she has not followed the university’s policies. The committee holding a hearing would listen to the testimony and make an unbiased judgement–that is why they are there.</p>
<p>OP, earlier in this thread, you wrote that the professor said there was overlap in 4 of 10 tests. He provided data from 3 tests. Has he now decided there is overlap of answers in only 3? Are they 3 in a row? Are the 3 randomly spread throughout the semester? Your son has an A in the class. How do the students’ test performances compare for the tests that are not similar? Now I remember that your son did well in a test that the other student bombed when your son took it a day later and the prof assumes the other student gave your son the questions. Could it be the other student is simply a poor student who in the process of taking the class developed a method of securing answers from your son? While the policy is to punish the provider of answers and the one who stole answers, with the technology available today a person could be providing answers without any knowledge of doing so. In such an instance, I would advise my child to take the WF and then let a good lawyer get it erased.</p>
<p>There is probable cause that cheating happened. But what evidence is there that the OP’s son is guilty of it? There is evidence that the other student can’t do well without the OP’s son in the room, and there is evidence that OP’s son can do well without the other kid in the room. How could the other kid have helped OP’s son if he/she didn’t know the answers in the first place. Sure it’s possible that the other kid told the OP’s son the questions, but that’s not the most likely scenario. </p>
<p>I actually think that you can argue that if the professor won’t nullify the tests and allow a retake or an incomplete with taking the tests next semester, then he must accept the results.</p>
<p>I am not sophisticated enough with statistics to make a judgment here, but my sense is the same as everyone else’s: This probably convinces me that an academic integrity violation occurred, and unless the OP’s son has strong proof he was innocent and victimized he should take the WF and discuss with his high school how it will appear on the high school transcript.</p>
<p>I want to note, however, that some of those errors seem to have been very, very common – in fact, assuming there were at least four choices, many could have been the most common answer by students in the class, and others the most common error (second-most common answer). I am tempted to ignore all of the common answers that were chosen by 30% of the class or more, and to discount some of the others. The upshot is that I believe the evidence of cheating really turns on 9 questions or so. That’s still a fair amount – given that they were consistent on everything else, too.</p>
<p>It sounds like this professor may be using this software:</p>
<p>Let students know that you will be using computer programs to detect cheating on multiple-choice tests. Programs such as “Cheat-l” and “Cheat-2” compare students’ responses and determine probabilities that pairs of students by chance will show the same distribution of answers (Aiken, 199 1). Even if you do not actually use the software, telling students you may, may be sufficient to deter cheating.</p>
<p>[Tools</a> for Teaching - Chapter](<a href=“http://teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/prevent.html]Tools”>http://teaching.berkeley.edu/bgd/prevent.html)</p>
<p>If there was cheating, could it have been done via electronic device? That’s all I can come up with, since the proctor didn’t see any cheating and the kids weren’t allowed to sit near each other. Some kids can text without even looking at their cell phones (which never ceases to amaze me.) Or, if these tests are online, could kids be feeding each other answers via Google Chat or something when the proctor isn’t looking?</p>
<p>Not that I’m accusing the OP’s kid of cheating, but it really does seem like there’s something going on . . . Either that or it’s one crazy coincidence.</p>
<p>My suspicion is also text messaging. </p>
<p>Fortunately, the OP can review the bill (detailed version online) as it will contain a timestamp for every text message that was sent and received. If texts were flying during the exam, she will know exactly what happened. If no texts were sent or received, then the question remains open.</p>