<p>Personally I think that a professor who recycles questions is cheating. Most professors that I had would hand out old exams for practice.</p>
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<p>I agree with this! If there were real QC in Universities, these profs would be found out and dismissed. Given the cost of college, they are the cheaters.</p>
<p>In terms of HW assignments, I don’t see any issues with accessing the solutions manual, talking with other students or using other resources. The point of HW is to learn the material.</p>
<p>It’s cheating if it’s a take-home exam or some other such things that is specifically supposed to be done independently. Or, if people are sharing answers on a test somehow through texting, etc. These people do occasionally get caught and they pay the consequences.</p>
<p>In the real world, people work together on things. Cheaters are those who steal other people’s ideas or take credit for others work. These types usually get found out quickly.</p>
<p>I have always been skeptical of the value of old tests. At the extreme example of recycling questions, the engineering physics class I took had an test question database (no answers) available to the students. Each test would pull 25 questions from a set of 100-150 questions, with multiple choice answers. So, all you really had to do for the class was sit down and solve as many as 150 questions before each test. Since a test lasts roughly an hour, that’s only 6 hours of prep time. Imagine dividing that among a dorm hall.</p>
<p>Amazingly, the test average was generally in the mid 70’s. People really did not treat the information seriously. Many would only read the questions and say “that looks easy” and proceed to do poorly.</p>
<p>So what’s my point? Not really sure, but someone who is seriously studying all the material available to them is going to do well. Maybe not excel, but definitely do solid work. As course work builds on itself, it becomes more evident who understands, and who memorizes.</p>
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<p>Just going to say that the point of homework isn’t always getting the right answers down on paper. Often times it’s understanding the thought process behind getting those steps people use solutions for. I’ve had a lot of really difficult homework sets where 95% of a problem wasn’t difficult, but that last 5% was trying to figure out the “trick” in the problem. That’s the important part of the assignment.</p>
<p>Now, you might say the students that copy the answers will get hurt by the exams. The problem then comes up if they have access to course materials from previous years that aren’t publicly available.</p>
<p>Professors I worked for would sometimes assign graded homework. Working in groups or using outside materials against the professor’s expressed wishes constitutes academic dishonesty. Working in groups or using outside materials without giving proper attribution is academic dishonesty. If maintaining one’s integrity means citing the solutions manual, so be it. It’s the principle of the thing.</p>
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<p>You’ve never taught a class or been around a lot of professors, have you?</p>
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<p>Well, that’s why the old exams and such should be publicly available. It keeps instructors honest and equalizes access to such resources.</p>
<p>One could say the same thing about worked solution manuals to just about every textbook out there, because they’re generally available in some form or another online. ;)</p>
<p>Rather than place the blame for academic dishonesty on lazy professors, I think it belongs with cheating students. I believe professors and administrators should be much more aggressive in their investigation and punishment of academic dishonesty; make it more severe and more likely to be caught and people will do it much less often.</p>
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Yeah, this will never happen. It’s too widespread to be punished effectively, and punishment is already pretty severe for the very few that get caught. Besides, who looks bad in the case of a cheating scandal? The professor and the school. Not so much the students, who almost always remain nameless.</p>
<p>Better to just stop students from having an incentive to cheat.</p>
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It’s impossible to enforce some of these rules (such as people copying other people’s homework on a frequent basis). It’s basically an honor code that can’t be checked. Also, it’s a slippery slope, because it’s hard to distinguish people who work in groups and people who directly copy others people’s work. No action should be taken in my opinion as there’s no good way to know for sure (except if someone copies word for word). However, homework is worth little usually, and it probably penalizes the person who doesn’t do the work anyway.</p>
<p>To be honest, graded homework is like 5 - 10% of your mark in engineering classes… I think most of the students see it as a waste of time to spend forever doing them. This is especially true when you have 6 classes all with weekly assignments and people start getting desperate.</p>
<p>The old tests though… that’s just networking if they get it from previous semester’s students. This may happen in industries later when someone who you believe is less qualified gets promoted over you because they happened to know the right people.</p>
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<p>If you include “projects” and “labs” in the homework category, most of my engineering classes have been more along the likes of 30-60% homework.</p>