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Would this be considered cheating?

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I can't believe some people think of it as cheating...

If the professor is too lazy or unintelligent to think of new problems based on the material he teaches, then he should be ashamed.

With that said, I've never used an old exam from a friend to study. My teachers often post old exams + solutions, but I've never gotten one that nobody else had.

I still don't think it is cheating, however. Good practice material is hard to come by. The problems professors write are often radically different from those supplied to you throughout the course. Seeing examples of problems your professor has written is a great way to learn what he wants.
 
They're called past papers where I come from, you use them as practise exams to get used to the types of questions you are asked. Sometimes questions are reused, sometimes not.

It would only be cheating if you had the 2010 exam so you could memorise exactly.
 
HamburgerBastard said:
Is my university the only one that has "Using old exams as reference material" explicitly listed in practically every academic dishonesty section of each class' respective syllabus? I'm not saying that the op is a terrible human being or a filthy cheating scumbag but the ignorance plea doesn't make much sense.
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One of the universities I attended had old professors exams on file in the library for students to check out & use to help them study. I'm not sure what led to this, perhaps it was acceptance of reality that fraternity and sorority members tend to manage access to old exams - this would even the playing field.

In my opinion, if the test has been returned to students, it's "out there." Anything out there is fair for students to study from. When my own students are studying for exams, I almost always give them the previous year's exam & have commented many times - I'm testing them on the most important material - the stuff they need to know. (well, about 90% of the questions - I add in a couple other questions from the unit to differentiate between A and B students.) Thus, exams certainly are similar. In many cases (since it's math), I merely change numbers & the order of the questions. i.e. if we're doing sequences and series, of course I'm going to have a question on determining the sum of an infinite geometric series. (.9 + .09 + .009 + .0009 + . . . = 1; heh heh thread hijack attempt.)

However, I know of at least one teacher from an area school who returns the tests to the kids and gives the exact same exam year after year. He/she calls it cheating if they use old copies of the exam to study from - I call it a poor excuse for enabling extreme laziness on his/her part. Heck, he/she makes it multiple choice and has the kids fill out one of those bubble sheets - 4 or 5 classes are corrected in 2 minutes; while it took me nearly 2 hours to correct the tests for just one section of pre-calculus the other day.
 
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Not cheating.

But if it really bothers you, send an anonymous note to the professor asking about it.

He WILL change the next test, and your conscience will be clear.
 
This happened a lot in college. If the professor is that naive and lazy, too bad. It's impossible to stop most students from doing that, especially those in fraternities who usually store previous students' exams.

I had a professor who would make the midterm/final exam by taking the previous year's exam and adding a page. He didn't even bother fixing spelling mistakes. Our exam was literally 5 times longer than the exam 5 years ago. A few poor students never knew they were based on previous tests or didn't have access to the tests. Either you got an easy 80%+ or you nearly failed.

Then we had a couple professors who gave us previous years' exams and told us to study using those.
 
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For some subjects, you can't help but repeat some of the same questions, especially for fact-based narrow subjects in lower level classes.

I had an AP class. I bought a Barron's book (sort of like Cliff notes but not really) from the local bookstore to study for it at the start of the year. I did some of the practice exams in there to prepare for the monthly exams for the class. The teacher decided to copy the Barron's book practice problems word for word to use on his exams that year. He decided to retire the next year after reaching his 20th year or whatever to get his pension.

Even more extreme case, the AP board (ETS or whatever the company that runs AP exams is called) releases and sells old AP exams publicly to make some money I guess. I bought a couple of the old exams that they released from a few years back. Imagine my surprise when not only does my AP teacher reuse like 90% of the questions from the old exam on my final but the *actual* AP exam that year reused like at least half the questions too.

I don't consider any of that to be cheating. It's just public study material out there. For some subjects, you just can't help but reuse questions because there's not much you can ask that's different from what's out there. The student still has to work through and figure stuff out or at least memorize things, which is how lots of subject material is anyway, regardless of recycling.

It would be different if the professor or your school had written guidelines prohibiting using last year's exam as study material but it doesn't sound it.
 
I bet if you told your professor he wouldn't care. He probably would continue using recycled exams even with the knowledge the exams are easily accessible. Lazy is as lazy does.

Is he even a professor? Sounds more like an instructor who is just out to collect a paycheck.
 
I guess this is why graduates today had have such high GPA and fucking know nothing, even on an academic level for a course they just took.

so sad.
 
i wouldnt consider it cheating, he never specifically told you not to look at the 2009 exam if you got a copy of it.
 
I wouldn't be surprised if the professor changed it up for the next exam and brought out one from 2008 to throw off everybody who studied the 2009 version to the T.

I really don't understand how studying old exams is cheating. Unless it was multiple choice where you just memorized the letter answers (A, C, C, D, A, B, E, B, E,...) or prior knowledge that the professor was going to bring out the 2009 version I really can't see how it can be cheating. And as far as you know you still have no idea if he will do the same thing for your next exam. Study away.
 
Ronstang said:
How would an academic institution even be able to charge him with academic dishonesty? He didn't cheat. The material is out there. It is not banned. Nobody stole it and is distributing it with intent to cheat. The prof did not say using old tests to study was against the rules. The prof is a lazy ass. There are many in our schools. Are you one of those lazy profs?
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It depends upon the rules they have about test papers.

Some schools do have rules that test papers are not, under any circumstances to be taken out of the room following the test, nor may candidates make any attempt to copy questions from the test paper.

You could argue that being in posession of a test paper, that was not specifically given to him by his prof, that he is being dishonest.

If, however, it is routine for students to keep their test papers after a test, then this argument wouldn't hold much water.
 
This is the grey area where some students get in trouble.

For example, here is the intro paragraph for the policy at the university where I attended

""Academic dishonesty" means employing a method or technique or engaging in conduct in an academic endeavor that the student knows or should know is not permitted by the university or a course instructor to fulfill academic requirements."

In your case, I think your friend may have stolen the exam (by not returning it)? I had only one professor who made students return the exams, and it was clearly stated in the course syllabus. So if you were caught with an exam from her class, you were in some doodoo.
 
ZOOYUKA said:
Is he even a professor? Sounds more like an instructor who is just out to collect a paycheck.
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This is a graduate level class and the professor is great at teaching. He's also a great researcher. He actually just won some very prestigious award within the scientific community(I forget which one).

I'm not sure why he doesn't make new tests.
 
404 moral dilemma not found.

you're just there to get your piece of paper, who gives a shit.
 
Not cheating at all. I had a similar situation in a physics class I took:

We had 2 textbooks... one was the class textbook and the other was the optional resource guide. For the final I checked out the resource guide from the library and took the practice exam at the end of the book. I go to class, test gets passed out, and sure enough it's the practice exam at the end of the resource guide verbatim. When I finished with a perfect test, I patted myself on the back for studying supplemental material.

Honestly, the way I look at exams-- if you know the material 100%, you could be asked anything (relevant to the class) and get a perfect on the test. The only way you would have cheated is if you found out the answers ahead of time for the specific test you were going to take, and just memorized / recorded them and spit them back out on the test. Using old tests or supplemental material to help you learn the material is in no way cheating, and the university would have no leg to stand on in pursuing that.
 
I agree with what a bunch of people have said: You didn't do it on purpose, so it wasn't (morally) cheating -- but a pissed off professor could give you a world of hurt anyway, so I wouldn't advertise what happened.

FWIW, this happened to me once, except almost everyone in the class was in the same boat.
 
So said:
I agree with what a bunch of people have said: You didn't do it on purpose, so it wasn't (morally) cheating -- but a pissed off professor could give you a world of hurt anyway, so I wouldn't advertise what happened.

FWIW, this happened to me once, except almost everyone in the class was in the same boat.
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Yeah. I don't feel like I did anything wrong, but I definitely don't feel like the right thing happened. I did not end up getting a fair grade relative to my classmates.

I have no plans of using my friend's exam to study for the next test because that would just feel wrong.
 
Leros said:
This is a graduate level class and the professor is great at teaching. He's also a great researcher. He actually just won some very prestigious award within the scientific community(I forget which one).

I'm not sure why he doesn't make new tests.
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In all honesty, coming up with good exam questions can be VERY difficult. This is often why professors/instructors re-use certain questions from year to year. Beyond that, writing new tests for multiple classes every semester would take far too much time, and you would be perpetually re-inventing the wheel. It makes much more sense to continually tweak exams rather than to create entirely new ones; it's not a matter of laziness, but of efficiency and quality.

That being said, yes, I'm quite sure some professors/instructors re-use tests from year to year simply because they don't want to bother writing new ones.

Would I have considered what you did to be cheating had you been one of my students? No, unless I explicitly stated at some point in class and on my syllabus that you were not allowed to use past exams (or exams from year XXXX) as study aids.
 
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