He says "obviously wrong" and did some probability assessments to avoid false positives (since it was multiple choice, not like they plagiarized an essay) so I guess it depends on what "obviously wrong" was. If it's so obvious that anyone who learned a minimal amount from the course should recognize that, it seems kind of irrelevant whether they fail the class because they cheated and blindly copied the answers or because they learned so little they deserve to fail outright.
Sort of related, my kid has a grading issue we're trying to work through. I'm not entirely clear on the specifics yet but one of his teachers gave his whole group a zero on an assignment for some (according to kid) spurious reason like the report formatting wasn't correct, and it also was one of those things where my kid says he carried 90% of the work for the group. Then they had a chance to correct it for partial credit and did so, but then the teacher changed his mind and reinstated the zero at the end of the term. This is not a small impact- it moves his grade for the class from something like 96 with the partial credit to more like an 80, and I feel like One Of Those People saying this but it would truly impact his chance of getting into the schools he wants to go to. His GPA otherwise is around 99. We encouraged him to discuss with the teacher but the teacher has responded with statements like "why should I change your grade because you're complaining when others won't get that benefit? Isn't this about equity?" I'm 80% sure the teacher is just making a statement and will relent, and 10% sure that if he's not we could work something out by asking him to assess whether a zero really reflects what our kid learned, but a 10% chance of blowing a kid's college applications because you're making a (according to kid, unfounded) statement about grading fairness seems harsh? AITA?

1. We asked the guy to clarify what he meant by "obviously wrong", and crickets. My concern: what's obvious to a philosophy prof isn't obvious to a freshman.

2. Quizlet isn't a cheating site, or at least not only a cheating site. You can use it to create flashcards out of study guides, or take practice exams. It's sufficiently legit that lots of kids come out of high school having been told by authorities that it's good to use it as a study guide. So it's completely plausible that at least some of the students in the class saw the test on Quizlet, thought a classmate had uploaded their study guide as a quiz, used it to study, and took the exam fairly having learned the obviously wrong answers. And indeed, guy has said some of them said this. It's apparently against school policy to study from old exams (but I couldn't find it in the handbook and that's I think also a bad rule.)

This was a big discussion in my groups and quite a lot pointed out that practicing for an exam by taking old exams is a *norm* of good studying in other disciplines.

3. This is an online, take-home exam. One ought to design an exam with the expectation that it's open book.

4. Quizlet is leaky so while this guy meant to catch his class, he's now put out false information that's going to show up on Quora, etc, by other students googling for answers.

5. There are so many ways he could have made that point - show the site in class, remark how easy it would be to put up a fake answer key, etc.

Also if it were my kid I'd recommend appealing this one to the provost. I'm not getting kicked out of school based on someone's statistical analysis of how likely it was I got an "obviously wrong" answer.

in brief, a philosophy prof found that one of his old exams had been posted, with answers, to Quizlet, so he had that taken down

I am a bit puzzled about why this is a bad thing. Over here it's common practice, when you're revising for an exam, to look at past papers - often with the correct answer, or at least a correct answer. It isn't considered unethical at all. My teachers at school handed out photocopied bundles of past papers all the time. They even ran mock exams where you sat a past paper under exam conditions, which was then marked. So you got an idea of the sort of questions that would be asked - in terms of topic and depth - and you got practice answering them under time pressure.

If we'd had the internet, then a website with lots of past papers (with answers) would have been a great thing to have.

But apparently at this person's institution, this is considered wrong:

"My University has an academic honesty policy that explicitly says that looking at other tests without the instructor's permission counts as cheating"

...which is, of course, insane.

Also, hilariously, this university philosophy exam was apparently multiple choice. Getting a real vibe of scholarly rigour here chaps.

Q3. Draw a Hegel using the crayon provided.

re: 2

This was a big discussion in my groups and quite a lot pointed out that practicing for an exam by taking old exams is a *norm* of good studying in other disciplines.

Norm of studying in philosophy. That's how I always did it, and how I taught others to do it. That said, I don't think I ever had a philosophy exam* where the answers weren't long-form essays. The idea of a multiple choice exam is very far from the norm, even in high school philosophy, anywhere I've ever been.

* other than formal logic exams.

I mean, it's obvious to a philosophy professor that whatever they said in class is obvious. But students mix up philosophers' names and positions all the time, so if "obvious" is "lol Kant isn't a utilitarian" and the "obvious" errors are correlated? He's not showing what he thinks he is.

I sometimes teach intro ethics to large groups of students, and I cannot begin to imagine having an all multiple choice final exam! Now, his teaching load might be much higher than mine, and who knows how he's otherwise structured his assignments, but the entrapment here isn't 'posting fake answers', it's 'assigning a take home multiple choice final exam'.

I don't want to blame him for this-- faculty with high course loads are in a tough spot with assessments for huge classes, and this challenge is much greater when assessment needs to be remote for whatever reason. But the pedagogical problem in this story isn't 'kids used Google.'

5: more common IME, although usually as a quiz or portion of a longer exam with essays.

Our cheating service is now known as Bard, and has your next English exam covered.

There's probably some kid walking around who thinks the meaning of life is '47' because of this.

I ran a binomial analysis and found the likelihood that someone whose answers matched on 19 out of the 45 planted questions had about a 1:100 chance of doing so by coincidence.

Also I suspect this man is a mathematical illiterate because the correct answer is 0.0005628. You have a roughly 1% chance of getting sixteen matches, not 19.

Also, reading the comments on the Daily Nous story makes me love Unfogged even more. You folks are great. Philosophers are the worst. And Daily Nous is the good Philosophy blog!

What if the problems have varying numbers of choices? Some could even be single choice?

SOKRATES: In order to answer that, O Thrasymakhos, we must first consider the nature of virtue. Can we say that a carpenter who becomes more skilful at his trade has thereby become more virtuous?
A: Yes.
B: No.
C: Insufficient information.
D: I prefer not to say.

GLAUKON: Would you like to phone a friend, O Thrasymakhos?

PLATO: (plays irritating count down music on pan pipes)

SOKRATES: I'm afraid I'm going to have to press you for an answer, O Thrasymakhos.

PLATO: doo-doo, doo-doo, doodley-do! boo!

My recollection from undergrad is that studying from a past exam was normal, and having classes pass them out as practice/study aids was moderately common but not universal. More interestingly, fraternities and similar living groups tended to accumulate archives of such things, and studying from those archives ("bibles") was more controversial - not because the past exams were forbidden material, but because having access to such an archive was unevenly available, depending on your living situation rather than being available from a campus or department library or course staff.

At the end of the year, Jammies was desperately trying to help some seniors across the finish line so that they could graduate on time. He had all sorts of make up assignments and credit recovery stuff.

He gave a worksheet to one guy, which was supposed to replace some missing assignments. It had four parts: A, B, C, and D. The kid circled one, as though it was a single multiple choice question, and turned it in at the end of class.

THEN, unbelievably, the scenario played out a second time, with a difficult worksheet, after they'd had a conversation about the first worksheet.

But at least there was definitely no cheating!

Not "difficult" - a different worksheet.

11, 13: I have no idea what "binomial analysis" means in this context, but it doesn't sound like a straightforward calculation of probability.

Why not compute the probability in the straightforward way?

Also 13 was in jest.

15: apparently some schools even have past exams available for check out in the library because of this.

I don't know. But that wouldn't be called "binomial".

I mean come on the guy is obviously acting unethically. Fundamentally, if you are a teacher and you put false information about your subject in a place where you know your students will see it, you are either being a bad unethical teacher or (as I suppose Plato would argue) not being a teacher at all, in the same sense that an unjust ruler ceases to be a ruler.

13: the article said that there were five options for each question.

Maybe it's a 99% confidence interval.

I feel like I need to point out that it's also completely plausible that a decent percentage of the class was cheating. Pandemic high school according to my students was just about cheating online because no one was holding them accountable. They're happy to admit this to me, usually while noting that they're out of practice at learning because they haven't done it for a few years.

But guy had a chance to steer them away from cheating and didn't take it, and his method of catching "cheaters" is completely ignorant of how students might legitimately study.

16 is great. I bet you the sheet said something like "Choose one of the following four questions, marked A, B, C and D". The kid did that. Sheet didn't say "...and then answer it", though, did it?

I taught a summer class online in 2020 (was moved online and we had to adjust). It went well. We were all in that new world together. I taught it a second time online in 2021 and it was a ridiculous cheatfest and I threw out some assigments/quizzes after grading them and told the students that it was because of widespread obvious cheating, which poisoned the atmosphere, if you can say an online class even has an atmosphere. This year I am teaching the class in person, and enrollment is about 1/3 (I'm guessing) what an online version would have attracted, and that means I'm making about 40% of what I would have made. But I'm not going back to teaching it on line. What the philosopher did might not have been ideal. Preventing cheating is always a million times better than punishing it. But for me the rampant cheating just sucked any joy out of the whole process of teaching, so I'm sympathetic to the effort to root it out. The students have agency, they've been told not to use old exams. FAFO as they say.

And if old exams are available to everyone, fine, that's valid to say they're a study guide. If they're not available to everyone then those who don't have access (or in this case, who are ethical enough to follow their school's rules) are punished for their lack of connections/dishonesty. When I was in grad school the grad student network passed around old exams from one professor who rotated between about 10 total questions over the years. But the grad student in the class who wasn't tight in that social network didn't have them. I don't feel good about the inequity there, and I blame myself for being part of that insider ring.

15: I don't recall ever having access to past exams, and frats' troves of past exams were quite definitively unethical.

I'm aware, of course, that studying through old exams is SOP at some places, but reading the comments here, I feel like people who experienced that are assuming way too strongly that it's the norm everywhere/NBD if people do it against the rules where it isn't.

15- A few years ago my wife made me throw out all the course bibles I had made. I guess that was reasonable but I'll be annoyed if one of the kids ends up needing one.
27 reminds me of a trying to be clever but annoying trick exam a teacher gave us in elementary school. The instructions said "read through all the instructions and questions before writing anything down" and of course some people start answering questions as you go and at the end it says "now hand in the blank paper without answering any questions, you're done."

Given the grades my kids have been bringing home (freshmen in HS and college), I sure as hell hope they haven't been cheating. Not terrible, but I'd expect straight As from smart kids who cheat.

On the question of "obviously wrong", I'm not sure it's actually that hard: if 4 answers are all roughly similar, and 1 is a total outlier, you only need a tiny amount of info about the topic to know whether the outlier is obviously correct or obviously wrong.

"The Father of the Skyscraper" was:
A. Louis Sullivan
B. Frank Lloyd Wright
C. Mies van der Rohe
D. Le Corbusier
E. Vitruvius

Not only is E a failing answer whether you've been tricked or not, seeing E given as the correct answer on Quizlet should clue you in that the Quizlet is bogus. Like, imagine seeing an exam with 100 obviously wrong answers and thinking, "Huh, I guess I didn't understand things as well as I thought."

I thought 30.2 was an urban legend.

That's what they said about the alligators in the sewer.

30/32: I also had this done to us in middle school, I think by a substitute teacher or in one of the minor once-a-week classes like library. It didn't help.

I remember some dumb exercise meant to tell us that we should read instructions along the lines of 30/34. I don't remember it exactly, it wasn't graded, it was just a "told you so" kind of thing.

We made a substitute teacher leave the room in eighth grade. It was fetal pig week.

28: do you think it can work for non credit courses? I've been wanting to get back into reading Latin and Greek literature, and I know that I don't have the discipline to do it alone. I'd love to take a class or have a zoom reading group, because coordinating schedules in person is hard.

I don't remember hearing much about people studying based on previous exams when I was in college, partly because I was not in any social circle that would have old exams, but also because I did a major where exams were either essay-based or there weren't exams, just papers. The rumored unethical thing was people putting their name on an essay someone else wrote for a previous version of the class, if the essay prompts hadn't changed. We did have review sessions where we talked about possible exam questions, some of which had been used before, but without seeing any previous answers.

I also think my school might have had a strict policy that you couldn't keep your final exams. You could come to the office and look at the comments and/or discuss your grade, but you couldn't take the copy home. So examples of previous work that people may have had would have been papers or midterms.

37: I think online courses can work fine for anyone who wants to learn, if that's what you're asking.

Exam boards (at high school level) in the UK (England and Scotland, which have different exams systems) publish books of past exam papers, explicitly for the purpose of studying. Similarly, when I was at university, it was common to be able to access archives of past exam questions provided by the department in order to guide your study. For philosophy, that was just a list of essay questions, without any kind of answers. It was helpful as you could sketch out sample essay plans for a load of the essays to ensure that you'd internalised enough knowledge to be able to answer a sufficient number of questions on any given exam.

The Bodleian has a dedicated service just for reading past exam papers: https://www.bodleian.ox.ac.uk/collections-and-resources/past-exam-papers

39: I learn best when I'm around other people who also want to learn. I'd like to find such a community online somehow for a video class. Are there any places where one might be more likely to find that?

31: sure, it's easy to make an obvious "Kant is a jelly bean" wrong answer. But it's not clear that's what he did -- and he hasn't responded to requests for clarification. If it's more like "it's obvious that Socrates taught Plato, checkmate cheaters!" then there's a risk that students who were right-but-unconfident were talked out of the right answers by a quiz that said Socrates didn't teach Plato.

Is it now standard practice for a philosophy class on ethics to have a multiple-choice final exam? I'm prepared to convict the professor on this basis alone.

Philosophy is the talk on a cereal box.

Multiple choice can be fine, depending. I use it for some of the tell-me-who-said-what kinds of questions, sometimes, but I prefer short essay exams.

29: I honestly cannot imagine why it should be considered immoral to look at or discuss previous years' exam papers. The questions are different every year! I'm fully aware that it's against the rules in some places, but my view is that those places are run by insane people.

Perhaps you can explain why you think "frats' troves of past exams were quite definitively unethical"? Unethical because it's an unfair advantage I can understand, or unethical in the sense of "against a written code of behaviour"...

Speaking of academic ethics, Michael Bailey, the fucksaw guy, whose number rob helpy-chalk had in that very 2011 thread, has just been forced to retract a new transphobic paper, which was purporting to study "Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria" via form responses on a webpage he/his people had set up called ParentsOfROGDKids.com. Not only is the underlying methodology pretty questionable, the crux turned out to be no one gave permission in that form for their info to be used in any research.

44: is this quote by

A: W. K. Kellogg
B: Immanuel Kant
C: Bob Dylan
D: Jamelle Bouie
E: Edie Brickell

This is a good exam question!

F: None of the Above.

49: Did you actually write that lyric? Apologies!

Wikipedia says one of us was a co-writer.

46: what on earth would lead you to conclude that no questions are ever re-used?

41: I don't have a good answer, especially for reading in Greek. My personal experience is that ANY adult learning classes (or AudUbon society meeting or other forum with audiences who chose to go to a class or talk) have wonderfully engaged people in them. The "I'm going to cheat my way through a class because literally all I care about is what grade I get" is specific to a very narrow (but paradoxically fantastically widespread) set of circumstances.

27: no! It was just like the set up, mathwise, for the following four parts of the problem!

I think 52.1 is the key. In some (many?) schools, tests can be reused and so getting copies of past tests is considered comparable to getting a copy of your own near-future test. Now, how well that expectation is communicated to everyone involved, I don't know. Usually it would be implicit in, say, whether someone with access to an old test would share it.

51: I think it's reasonable to assume from wikipedia that Edie Brickell wrote the lyrics.

sure, it's easy to make an obvious "Kant is a jelly bean" wrong answer. But it's not clear that's what he did -- and he hasn't responded to requests for clarification.

Is the test still on Quizlet? Surely someone could just go look at it to clarify this sort of thing (which I agree is unclear and important to assessing his actions).

It is kind of hilariously apt that this is specifically for an ethics class.

Next year he should assign an essay on the ethics of his own behavior this year. Or someone should, anyway.

In my experience, whether using a past exam to study is considered cheating depends a lot on local norms but also how it's characterized. Running through past exams as practice? Okay. If the exam question happens to come up in the actual exam? Lucky you! Your work paid off. Trying to memorize answers in the hopes that the exam will be exactly the same? Probably not okay, but also usually self-defeating as most professors rotate at least some of the questions. The issue of fairness was usually one of access - if the frat had a test bank, etc.

One variable here is that if the exams are in person or proctored, it really doesn't matter as at some point the student has to do the work themselves. One can't teach as if the internet doesn't exist.

If you're giving exams where having access to previous exams is an advantage then you're doing a bad job as a teacher, period. You should be giving the students a practice exam that's at least as similar to the exam as any previous exams are. You need to make at least some effort to make cheating slightly difficult.

Homework is trickier, because writing all new homework is difficult, and since students can already cheat on homework in other ways so it doesn't really make things easier if you reuse questions. I've found that for more advanced classes it cuts way down on cheating if you never assign problems from books by number, and instead retype them. So I'll do something like where there's 5 questions, of which 2 are directly taken from the book and retyped, maybe one from a different book, and 2 I wrote myself, and it cuts way down on cheating while not requiring excessive effort.

These questions always remind me why I'm so, so happy to be 20+ years out from formal education and never going back. It's entirely about of values.

If your highest value is that people *learn material and skills,* then any strategy that relies on tricking them or undermining their trust in you is a bad strategy. As others in this thread of have noted, there are many other ways the professor could have tried to accomplish that goal.

If your highest value is that the *scoring integrity of your bespoke scoring system remains intact,* your exam design needs to reflect the reality of the world as it is, not as you prefer it to be, because you can never fully control people's access to sites like Quizlet.

If your highest value is that *some people get labeled winners and everyone gets ranked,* then cheating doesn't really matter because at the end of the day there will still be winners and losers. (To be clear, I think this entire belief is evil.)

If your highest value is *the people paying the tuition bills don't complain to Customer Service*...well, you call can fill in the blanks.

In conclusion: In my perfect world, no one would get any grades ever. We would use other types of formative and summative assessment to help learners and teachers accomplish their goals, which would sometimes include no assessment at all. I know this works just fine for all kinds of rigorous and well-researched reasons, but also because it was my life from 0-16 and 22-now.

*about values, that is.

If you wish to present the student with a novel problem, whose answer requires the student to know and apply the material covered, then there is a huge advantage to the student in having seen the problem before. It's no longer novel, and the student could have asked others "how do I answer this question I've never seen before?" Reproducing the answer someone else gave them is not the same as coming up with the answer on the spot. 60.1 seems to think that there is an infinite supply of problems like that, that in writing new ones twice a year for 30 years the instructor would never run out. Use them once, consign them to the scrap heap forever? The 60th version is exactly as on point and accessible to the student as the first one, or something like that? Or is that sort of problem not supposed to be on an exam? Having seen that TYPE of question is very different from having seen that specific question.

Also I'm lazy and rewriting every question on every exam is a pain. I sometimes do it, but it's not at the top of what I think makes me an adequate teacher.

Exams are not a good setting for solving genuinely novel problems, and solving genuinely novel problems is not reasonable to expect for undergraduates. Solving novel problems should be done over a longer timeframe in a more flexible environment.

NMM Daniel Ellsberg

Great. Now I'll never find out if the war in Vietnam is winnable.

solving genuinely novel problems is not reasonable to expect for undergraduates.

This reminds me of a grading scale explanation I saw where 'A' was anything above 85 (out of 100) but effectively meant the scale was out of 90 because the criteria for ratings above 90 was at the level of "accepted for publication or as a paper at a major conference". I guess fine, put everything on one scale but it's kind of absurd to (pretend to) apply that rubric to generic coursework.

67: Tell me about it.

Seconding 12, this is a great thread.

It's too soon to tell.

"Exams are not a good setting for solving genuinely novel problems, and solving genuinely novel problems is not reasonable to expect for undergraduates"

We are talking here about a multiple choice test ffs. No one is asking these students to come up with a new macroeconomic model or something.

"3. This is an online, take-home exam. One ought to design an exam with the expectation that it's open book."

I'd go further and say one *cannot assign take-home exams*. You have to adjust to the reality that there's a multi-billion dollar cheating industry, and that (especially post-pandemic) the vast majority of students will take advantage of that industry. If you have a take-home exam, you're just grading student on how much money they have to spend on cheating. Meaningful assessment cannot be done in an unproctored setting.

Of course, I'd be more than happy to ditch grading entirely, but that has its own issues since a lot (maybe most?) students are there for a degree so that they can get a middle-class job and have no actual interest in learning. (The real solution here is to stop requiring degrees for jobs, and find a way to hire based on people's skills and knowledge, but that's also difficult and not something most employers are interested in doing.)

"Having seen that TYPE of question is very different from having seen that specific question."

It's not *that* different, but yes I agree you should vary the exact details of the question from year-to-year while letting the students know exactly what types of questions will be on the exam. That is, if you understand the material, then there should be no meaningful difference between the practice exam and the exam, but if you don't understand the material it should be different enough that memorizing the practice exam with no understanding isn't very helpful. But you shouldn't be asking the students to be clever in an exam setting, that's going to result in judging students based on their test anxiety more than on their ability to be clever.

60 If you're giving exams where having access to previous exams is an advantage then you're doing a bad job as a teacher, period.

In my experience it is really, really hard to come up with exam questions. Once I've taught a class a few times, say quantum mechanics, I start repeating questions from old exams or recycling old homework sets into exam problems, because I literally cannot think of other questions that are solvable in the amount of time allotted that I haven't assigned before. (Occasionally I can slightly change some coefficients or something, but some questions just don't work that way.)

I've tried to just move away from using exams, for the most part. Maybe I'm just uniquely bad at this.

Change some numbers and also put the questions your repeating on a practice exam you're giving to the students. I'm not saying you need to come up with novel questions, I'm saying the opposite of that, you should ask predictable questions. But I am saying that the students should not be surprised by the content of the exam.

"what on earth would lead you to conclude that no questions are ever re-used?"

Only my experience of every exam I've ever set or taken. But if it's common to set the same exam year after year in other places, then I suppose I've just been lucky.

Setting the same exam every year is a joke, no? About history or economics or politics, and the punchline is that, yes, the questions are always the same but each year the correct answer is different?

The UK takes a very different and more rigorous approach to writing and grading exams than the US does (and ties grades to a single exam in a way that would be unthinkable in the US).

I do give practice exams, which compounds the problem since that's even more problems I have to think up. I literally never had a professor give a practice exam when I was an undergrad, but the first time I taught at my current institution I found that the students demanded it. They also demand detailed solutions to every homework problem set, which again basically never happened at my undergrad institution. I suppose that all of these things are reasonable, but I'm surprised that it's such a norm, and I wonder if it's because the students at my current institution are so entitled (whereas my undergrad institution had much more of a reputation for difficult, sink-or-swim classes) or if it's because things changed everywhere in the decade or so between when I was in college and when I started teaching.

Change some numbers

That's possible for certain special types of problems, but not for most good problems (which involve analytically solving something, or proving something).

Students in my classes typically get in the 70% to 100% range on the exam, whereas I remember that my undergrad quantum prof once gave an exam where the median grade was 3 out of 50 (though a few of us had 45 or more). So maybe part of the problem is that I have too strict a criterion for "questions that are solvable in the amount of time allotted." Though I imagine I'd have angry house deans calling me if I gave students scores below 10%.

When I was a student at your school detailed solutions were absolutely not expected. I'm pretty sure, judging from summer math experience, that that's a cohort thing that started with people who graduating highschool sometime in the early 2010s. I don't really understand what drove the trend, but I think it's parallel to the big increases in homework assigned in high school and the resulting dysfunction around what "studying" means (i.e. it means googling).

81: When I took quantum at your school the high score on the midterm exam was less than 2 problems out of 10. Students were not happy. The median score was something like 8/100.

80: Right, but you can't really ask good questions on exams (except maybe finals), good questions require time.

Even if you can't just change the numbers, there's often a thing you can do like say switching a sine and a cosine or reflecting in some coordinate. It doesn't change the problem if you understand the concept, but if you don't know what's going on it will throw you off. And it's too much work to try to memorize the answer to all versions of a question you can get by reflecting axes and time, that's like 8 different questions!

83: wow! I can't imagine that happening now.

My high school didn't have calculus and the physics class was me and a guy who went on to invent off-road wheel chairs.

82: I notice that sample answers are given when the graders are external bodies. Like, when a I took AP US History, not only did the teacher try to train us on the types of questions that the AP test would ask, he also showed us sample answers. This is an important skill, because the kind of essay you write on a test is different from writing a research paper. We also had to write short answers using primary sources, and again they had old test questions. That was useful, because it was unlike how the teachers would have assessed us otherwise. All of ten teachers tried to get gigs grading the AP exams so that they could coach us on how to answer the questions.

I think teachers gave us sample tests in my moral reasoning course and tried to show us non-concentrators examples of a good answer, since we were all studying something that was not our field of study.

79 sounds terrible! I give extra credit for students who write their own practice tests, because I think it's a good way to get them to start studying early and think about what might be on the exam. Then I share the practice tests with the class. They get a large selection of practice problems but I don't have to write two exams.

That's a good idea. I've been trying to teach students that they can write their own exams, but haven't gotten as far as you have. For my honors class I assign homework from the book that I don't collect (they also do groupwork in class) but tell them that it's just to prepare them for the quiz, and so if there's some type of problem and they get the first two they should just move on to a different topic, but if they struggle then they should just do more problems from the book on that topic! (I also make them the numbers where they can look up the answer in the back, so that then they don't need the grading to figure out if they did them right.) And then the quiz is in-class and proctored, and just like the homework.

The title for this post should have been "No, it's the children who are wrong."

That would have been better.

When I was in college, I seem to remember a majority of my professors would give us old exams and encourage us to use them to study.

Teaching sounds stressful. Add to that the strain of living in central Pennsylvania, and it can apparently drive you to want sex with dogs.

91 In contrast, this from the kids' climate change trial: https://twitter.com/amandaleggert/status/1669830269812068360

93: I saw that headline but didn't read through an article until just now. In the park. Since 2014.

95: It's a Simpson's reference.
96: Unfortunately, it is a real thing. I guess it shows that sexual offenders at Penn State are improving from the wosrt.

97.1 D'oh!

(I knew this already)

My Shakespeare professor was probably having sex with her dogs? And any rate she has a book with a chapter about sex with dogs and posed with her dogs for some kind of dog sex magazine.

https://marjoriegarber.com/Dog-Love.php

I can't think of a class I've had where studying prior exams was ok and the exams weren't handed out by the instructor. It's probably fair to assume that someone looking for one on a student-submitted website knows that what they're doing is at least cheating-adjacent, particularly if answers are included on it.

But having your final exam be 70 multiple choice questions, and having it be the same test year after year, seems like a bigger issue. Professors I would trust to accurately recognize which answers were obviously false to students are not ones that would do that.

How many kinds of dog sex magazines could their be?

There is a doggy position joke to be made, but I am too dignified.

Speaking of college and dignity, WVU's men's basketball coach got caught driving drunk on the North Shore during the Taylor Swift concert. I assume he couldn't get tickets to the concert and got drunk instead. But the article says he was driving from Ohio to West Virginia.

Ok: Movie from ~25 years ago. There's a running gag where every time they go in a convenience store, the macarena is playing. Anyone know what I'm talking about?

It's a catchy song about a woman who has a threesome cheating on her boyfriend.

Have you signed up for your colonoscopy yet, young man?

Nothing is open. I took my son for his learner's permit and they were closed for Juneteenth even though that's not until Monday.

And I knew Juneteenth is Monday because I get Monday as a paid holiday.

100: god DAMN it, I had real plans to use my intellect tonight in valuable ways and now I'm thinking about MG fucking dogs. Why even... how do you even know this?

I get Monday as a paid holiday but I still have to work.

110: maybe 105 could be a useful distraction?

Movie from ~25 years ago. There's a running gag where every time they go in a convenience store, the macarena is playing

Heebie, I don't know if this this is the movie you're thinking of, but whatever you're thinking of is going to have a tough time topping this.

110: I took her class! Aren't you curious about whether your own Professor fucks dogs? It's not like I was going all across the country looking for the one Professor fucking dogs. At any rate the book had just come out like a year before I took the class so it was a known topic. In a curious person so I actually went and found the book in the library rather than just joking about it at the dining hall.

2023 google is worse than 1999 Alta Vista and can't find anything about the magazine article.

At any rate, the reviews at Amazon were hilarious, a lot of either "I thought this was going to be a cute book about dogs and then there was this disgusting chapter" or "I only bought this for the bestiality part, but actually the whole book is really interesting."

Fwiw she has some overlap with Ogged, and thinks that the main function of renascence lap-dogs was for oral sex for the ladies.

At the end of the day probably she doesn't actually duck her dogs, but she was definitely being coy about it, in the service of being non-judgemental about her research subjects.

I wonder what the teaching evaluations were like.

114: Maybe others were hidden, but I only saw one negative review like that, and all it said was there was a "litany of references to bestiality in literature".

114.last is now a theory I will treat and correct and noncontroversial.

This reminded me of the rumors that an English professor at my alma mater had a stay at an insane asylum because he believed that he was Charles Dickens. I got a sense of how these rumors got started, when in a one-credit class on Middlemarch, he started class one day by reading from a letter Dickens wrote to George Elliot, and then asked us all to sing "Happy Birthday" to Charles Dickens.

117: I'm remembering old reviews, not looking at the new ones. I don't know if they last forever? I think it was Amazon then.

It's not easy to be ahead of one's time, but not everyone lives long enough to see the world come around.

Anyway, if it's 47% of women having sex with their dogs, it has to be, like, 98% of college professors.

My review of VW's book is still there after ten years, but my reply to Bill Emblom's review is not. The reply was better.

Bill Emblom

Now there's a name I've not heard in a long time...

I responded to him, too. I remember chuckling at one of the other responses. Had no idea it was you.

The one about the hemorrhoid surgery?

I don't remember!

Bill has won.

The reply was better.

It was emblomatic?

OT: I stumbled across this short story completely by accident and it's really rather good:
"Disappear Me" by Steve Himmer
https://vol1brooklyn.com/2020/02/16/sunday-stories-disappear-me/

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