My chapter of Tau Beta Pi (engineering honor society) got so tired of how unfair it was that people would share around old tests and decided to do something about it. Since there is no way to stop people from doing this, we got permission from the dean to start a test and study sheet bank and made it publicly accessible on a website.
Over his whole career as a professor, my father was so concerned about test sharing that he kept a file of every test he ever gave and was careful to never ask the same question twice.
> my father was so concerned about test sharing that he kept a file of every test
I finished 2nd in my high school class (humble brag) because my best friend cheated (and got a zero) for an important biology term paper.
Story:
- My friend hated biology and he decided he would save time by submitting his older brother's bio term paper as his (his brother was 4 years older).
- A month after we handed in our term papers, the bio teacher asks my friend to step into his office, whereupon he shows him a copy of his brother's term paper. Big fat zero.
- It dinged my friend just enough that (even though he was more talented) he finished 3rd in the class.
- I ended up getting a tuition waiver to our state university (where we both went).
That laziness cost him about $10K in tuition (in 1980s dollars).
edit: the person who finished 1st in our class went to Yale. She was more talented than both of us combined.
Errr... many questions can just vary numbers a bit. There's very little value to knowing that the inverse of 3 mod 7 won't be asked this exam - it's trivial to change the numbers and test the same knowledge with a slightly but sufficiently different question.
I imagine there's a somewhat similar type of questions for non-CS disciplines (same case description, different key clue, hence different answer).
It's not entirely trivial, it takes work. If you are simply changing the number but ask the inverse of x mod y every time you didn't win the game. 2 out of 3 times changes nothing.
I had the most fun with multiple choice tests. I took the average A,B,C and D answers from previous tests. The teacher not paranoid would have a lot of B, slightly less A and C and below average D answers. The paranoid teacher would have perfect distribution. The supper paranoid used some kind of RNG which also comes in patterns.
One of each type came to ask me how I did it at the end. The last one was funniest. He had one test with a trick question that everyone got wrong. It just didn't have enough C. One of my answers was more likely wrong than right. I had to go over the A,B,D answer candidates a few times. Reduced the list to 3 potential trick questions. Figured out that 2 of them were correct. Don't ask me why but the remaining one must have been C.
He explained how over his [long] career he started out with to few D answers. I name the other teachers still doing that. He then went for the perfect distribution. I name the teachers still doing that. And now he thought he had the perfect formula. How am I suppose to fix this?? He asked. I'm like, I'm not doing your homework but I do foresee a very interesting meeting with the other teachers.
edit: I did study but cheating was just to much fun. When they switched to tests on computers I made a good bit of money as administrator. I swapped some of the answers around so that the wrong answer was right and everyone got poor grades. They would purchase the list of correct answers from me. Then after they aced it I would reduce their grade to something sensible for the student. When they protested I told them that they paid for answers not for grades. Grades are very expensive as -hey- they could potentially ruin this good thing I got going here!
Am I understanding this comment correctly that you were administering tests and rigging them to cause people to fail and then charging people money to get the rigged answers for the tests so they could pass?
If so, this is some real unethical and criminal behavior.
But I'm inclined to think it's all made up considering the first part of the comment seems to imply that you were doing well on tests simply by guessing the answers based an A,B,C,D distribution. Which is silly as the best you are going to do with that strategy is maybe get a slight hint for a few of the more difficult questions.
> Am I understanding this comment correctly that you were administering tests and rigging them to cause people to fail
They got many answers wrong on the test but I adjusted their grades later. The grades do have to be credible for the show to continue.
> and then charging people money to get the rigged answers for the tests so they could pass?
People who didn't bother to study purchased the answers but if they always had low grades they would forever have low grades.
> If so, this is some real unethical and criminal behavior.
The only thing that really bothered me was this: Modifying the log files left a log entry with a terminal number in the log. I provided the teaches with a fair clue by changing the test answers and indeed eventually they smelled a rat. The cat and mouse game couldn't go on forever, eventually they would figure it out. I picked a scapegoat, a girl who couldn't hurt a fly. It couldn't have happened to a nicer person.
The teachers ganged up around her pointed and shouted then suspended her for a week.
I thought they acted ridiculous so I erased everything from the server and arranged for backups to be formatted when attached.
A few years later I ran into her and apologized but she didn't recall the event.
The teachers were very happy to return to paper based tests.
> unethical and criminal behavior
Ah yes, was I ever that young? We got computers in school and all we were allowed to do was tests. I assure you I've learned quite a lot. For example: Backups should have write protect implemented in hardware. Who in their right mind....
My discrete mathematics course had an oral exam for the final exam. I took it as a summer course and the books didn’t arrive until 1/3 into the class’s.
I felt like I was BSing my entire oral exam but got an A.
I was never the same after that course. 10 hours a day of logical homework fundamentally changed how I thought.
To this day I still cringe when people use phrases like everyone or all without actually meaning the set of everyone in existence.
