<p>Well the first week of classes, I went onto Blackboard and downloaded all the handouts etc.... There was a folder called "Exams" for my calculus class so I assumed it would be practice exams and downloaded and saved those files too. Yesterday, I did the two "practice exams" that I had downloaded for the first exam. Today, I went into class and found out (by myself) that one of the practice exams was exactly the same as the actual exam. I checked on Blackboard again and when I checked there was only one practice exam for the first exam up on blackboard and the identical exam was no longer on Blackboard. Seeing as I had already done the practice exam, I definitely aced the test. However, I really don't know if not telling the teacher would be the right thing to do.</p>
<p>What would you do in this scenario? I suspect that I have a copy of every exam for the semester so I will delete those and download the exam folder again but what should I do for this exam?</p>
<p>You know what you should do or you wouldn’t have posted the question. The only thing you can do and preserve your integrity is to tell your professor. You shouldn’t get into trouble as there was no intent to cheat since you didn’t know that one was an actual test, and it was uploaded in error. </p>
<p>But how do you know that you are the only one to have downloaded the actual exam? The prof has a real issue here. He also needs to come clean with the class and tell them what he did. If I was the prof, I would throw out all the grades for that exam and either go with one fewer grades for the class or have the students write out a new exam (which will go over really well I’m sure).</p>
<p>I would be reallly reluctant to delete it. For years teachers have been telling me that if they make a mistake in our favor they don’t recommend that you change it. Its tough qoute tough.</p>
<p>I’ll take the middle road. You did nothing wrong, and therefore have nothing to come clean about. You went to the store during normal business hours, picked out an item or two from hundreds of identical items marked with identical prices. Late in the day the storekeeper realized he’d made a pricing error, and immediately repriced remaining items in stock. He’s aware that some mispriced items were sold before he noticed the error … and he’s not requesting the items be returned.</p>
<p>HOWEVER … you put the future tests on layaway, to use and enjoy later. Knowing what you now know, it would be wrong to insist on keeping them. Delete them. JMHO of course.</p>
<p>Your professor would know that he or she did this by accident and set permissions correctly. You have your school in your profile. You have your hometown in your profile. If the professor reads at CC then it shouldn’t be too hard to figure out who you are.</p>
<p>The proper thing to do would be to inform the instructor and take a make-up exam or the professor could just let the grade stand. You may have done the problems in practice but you still have to execute in the real exam.</p>
<p>The problem is that you can do the right thing and get punished anyways.</p>
<p>BTW, I’ve seen cases where a professor puts out the homeworks for the semester and leaves them there until the start of the next semester and where the homeworks are the same from semester to semester. The crazy thing is when the solutions are posted in the first semester too. One could just grab all of the files.</p>
<p>Even if the professor removes the file, they might also be on the Internet Wayback Machine (records web page histories). This wouldn’t happen with Blackboard because you have to authenticate to get in.</p>
<p>I think that this mostly happens with older professors that were teaching before the internet age. In the past, you could probably get away with using the same stuff from semester to semester. Some frats may have kept the old tests around but I think that most students wouldn’t think of looking for people that had taken the course before.</p>
<p>BTW, if your school is up-to-date on Blackboard versions, they should have audit trail information at the file level so that someone, perhaps an administrator, should be able to see who accessed the exams. That said, a professor wouldn’t necessarily know about audit trails. A database or security expert, yes. But your typical professor, without training, probably wouldn’t know about them.</p>
<p>If you have to authenticate to get into blackboard.com then it’d be possible to determine exactly *who<a href=“as%20far%20as%20the%20authentication%20credentials%20go”>/I</a> downloaded what - i.e. if there’s a suspicion that someone somehow downloaded this exam from there then it’d be possible for an admin for that system to see exactly who downloaded it and exactly when.</p>
<p>Profs are individuals so it’s hard to say how it’d go down but it’s hard to believe the prof would hold it against you personally if you did something normal for most students to do, i.e. consult blackboard.com, and then once you became aware of the issue *informed<a href=“forget%20the%20’come%20clean’%20phrase”>/i</a> the prof of the issue. This is all above board (I presume - I’ve never been to blackboard.com).</p>
<p>Inform the professor prior to submitting the exam that I think this test was academically compromised and explain the circumstances.</p>
<p>If I was unable to bring myself to do this yesterday, I would contact the professor ASAP, by whatever means necessary. In person with “hat-in-hand” if necessary.</p>
<p>The reason to inform is, of course because it’s the right thing to do. But sometimes people do the right thing because they are afraid of being caught. I began to wonder - if another student did the exact same thing as you and informed, the professor might ask for an audit trail and then you’d be standing there guilty with the exams in your possession. Sometimes innocent people get painted guilty because they didn’t act quickly to preserve their innocence.</p>
<p>Several profs my D has had over the past year have used an audit trail to verify she actually had attempted to post on discussion boards, etc. (she had and received full credit). This prof could have done the same and I wonder why there was no communication to the students after the error was discovered and no attempt made to change the exam…clearly the prof knew it had been posted in an area his student’s had access to! I think that your prof will appreciate your honesty though and your own conscience will be clear if you mention to him that you did the test as a practice exam.</p>
<p>You did not do anything wrong. You must tell the teacher, however. Just explain it exactly as you explained it to us. The important thing is that you learned the material. Make sure you tell the teacher.</p>
<p>If you talk to the instructor tomorrow, you have an “out” for not saying anything at the time of the exam - you didn’t know that the practice test wasn’t still out there for everyone until you went home and looked.</p>
<p>got a email back telling me to not worry about it. He said that since the school changed Blackboard systems, for some reason old files were restored and he didn’t catch it and the future exams will be different.</p>
<p>Wow, don’t you feel good now! No worry that at some time the first exam will come back to bite you…
You did the right thing (and you now have a prof who knows you as one who does…)</p>
qoute tough.</p>