found my university exam online

[uniadvice84747]

i’m in my final year of university and have just done one of my exams. it was a multiple choice question exam done from home online.

basically i’m really confused and feel a bit like i’ve done something i shouldn’t have - my teacher had released practice quizzes over the last few months. these quizzes were taken directly from an external website not linked to the university, so they’re not the teachers own questions etc. didn’t think much of it as they were practice quizzes. i’ve been doing those, printed them off, studied them multiple times etc.

the actual exam today was made up entirely, word for word, of those questions. it took me about 10 minutes to complete an hours exam because i had literally studied the exact questions as revision. so my teacher has basically copied and pasted questions from a different website for our exam. is this allowed? i feel like i’ve cheated because i sort of knew every question and answer before they were up and it’s panicking me a bit, i also don’t understand why a teacher would copy and paste official exam questions for a real exam, it seems so risky? you can literally google the question and the whole quiz comes up with all of the answers on the original website?

It's quite normal to recycle questions, those that practice and work through all past papers will always have seen the material before. Those that haven't bothered to won't. You didn't cheat you were well prepared.

It happened to me. My standard revision method was to plough through as many past papers, open book, as possible.

One of my papers, maths based, completely contained questions cut and paste from a variety of past papers, a couple even had the same numbers.

Don't worry about it.

I did so many previous exam papers for my maths A level I'd already answered 19/20 questions on the actual exam paper.

I also has a half day assessment centre where they asked me to write a paper about a specific piece of law that I'd been set an essay about as part of my masters degree.

It's the luck of the draw, we'll played!!!

Well, a bit of dumb luck came your way.
But you did the work to revise, you are the one who sat the exam & completed the work.

Had you not done any work & previous papers in the previous months then none of the knowledge would have sunk in, nor would you have been so adept at getting to grips with the paper under exam conditions.

Your teacher is not at fault. Exam boards recycle exam questions for subjects as they are carefully worded to draw out & score how much students know, & said exam boards publish previous papers. A good teacher has pupils working through previous papers months in advance to tease out knowledge & weak spots, & to get students used to answering exam questions.

Yes I had a similar situation.
Tutor gave us two essay questions to write and hinted they might be worth spending more time on. Wish I had listened a bit more as the essay title was in the exam.

@CuriousaboutSamphire

You have been diligent and have cmpleted a lot of practice questions. That's what you are supposed to do.

Your lecturer on the other hand has been lazy. If there is any fall out it cannot land on your shoulders. If anyone asks tell them the truth. You have nothing to lose. Lecturer has quite a bit to lose and deserves to be caught out.

I could never have got away with it.

This.

I wouldn't have gotten away with this either in my lecturing days.

@Tal45

This just happened in one of my sons mocks.

How on earth can you do exams at home? The potential for people to cheat (or in your case to look like they've cheated) is huge. Seems like a terrible idea to me and would never be allowed in schools. Crazy.

This might not be relevant, but in GCSE maths, the exam boards insisted that we had to set the kids an actual existing paper as a contingency assessment (or whatever they're calling it atm) So we weren't allowed to write our own paper, we had to use one which is freely available online 🤷‍♀️

This is very, very poor practice by your lecturer. Taking the mocks from existing resources, okay. Composing the exam entirely of seen questions: I will politely say that is a matter of opinion. The combination: on a privately taken exam, just awful.

Are you in the U.K.? If so the problem is that uni exam marks are moderated. If for the sake of argument the average mark is 95%, in the Faculty where I lectured that would have been moderated downwards substantially. Because of the lecturer’s laziness there is no way to separate out the strong students.

Exams are pre-refereed within each School (I think this is nationwide practice), and there are External Examiners at the Exam Boards for quality control. But no one is going to suspect what you have disclosed here - because it is almost beyond imagining - unless students make it known. (I cannot imagine a referee agreeing to the exam and procedure you have described.) I would hope that having done so the School could think about how to make sure students are not harmed.

The fact that students were tackling previously worked questions from the privacy of their homes is another aspect of troubling practice your School is likely unaware of.

I agree with everyone that you should not worry about having done anything wrong and your lecturer has done you a great disservice.

If I were on your course I would be sounding out a few friends I thought would share my concerns, as the strong students should. Then I would try to make a group appointment with the Director of Undergraduate Studies or Senior Tutor or someone in a similar role. Usually there will be at least two or three academics with
UG leadership roles: choose the most sympathetic. Plan how you will calmly tell them what happened, that it doesn’t seem the correct procedure for a uni exam, etc. Make sure you have saved copies of the publicly available sources of all the questions, and remember, IMO using them for term time quizzes was okay (not great, and should have been cited) so I would not criticise that. It is the re-use of publicly sourced material for an exam taken privately that is the issue. Or, you can go it alone. And no one will think less of you if you feel it is in your own interests to let sleeping dogs lie, though as a former university lecturer in this instance I disagree. (There is always the anonymous letter.). Good luck

This is exactly why it's a good idea to do practice tests and look up past exam papers etc as part of your revision. Because for any given topic, there's usually only a finite number of questions (or type of questions) that can really be asked. Especially if this module has been taught for many years - eventually there just won't be any new questions that can be created.

As for feeling like you've cheated, OP - bear in mind that the whole class has taken the same exam as you. Nobody will be singled out. If you end up doing better than everyone else, it's because you actually did the revision and test quizzes, which are always a recommended thing to do. If other people in the class don't do so well, it's probably because they didn't revise or didn't do the practice quizzes. I don't see how you can get into trouble for the teacher's actions.

By the way, I once did a newly-created module that had never been taught before at my uni. But it was a subject that had been taught for many years at other unis, so I still managed to get hold of a few of their past exam papers online. In fact, the lecturer who brought in this module had already taught it at her previous uni, so I even found one of that uni's past papers. On the day of the exam, one of the questions was quite similar to one that I'd seen on another uni's past paper. Because even between universities teaching the same module, there's still only a finite number of questions that can be asked, even if slightly rephrased.

This happened to me once in an art history class. It was a huge boon! I actually learned loads studying with the old tests because it only was the tests, not the answers, that were publicly available. At first I thought it was a fluke, but then looking back I wonder if the teacher did this on purpose because reviewing all of the material to find the answers in test prep was quite effective for cementing key knowledge we needed for the class.

Absolutely agree with @poetryandwine

Some posters are missing the point. This isn’t a previous exam paper that has been recycled, much like a GCSE mock would be, it’s a cut and paste job from a well known website! This is a university lecturer who really should have known better!

Please don't worry. I'll bet you're not the only one who feels like you.

Don't forget, you diligently went through all of these practice papers and you've learned from them.
Also don't forget that you've put in very hard graft in your research and essays etc...

Maybe think of it as a little bonus for all your hard work.

Yes, your lecturer was lazy though.

@Justkeeppedaling

Something similar happened to me when I was doing my O Levels many many years ago. I did loads and loads of past papers for Physics with DDad (physics teacher) because I was hopeless at it. The past paper I did the night before the exam was almost identical to the actual exam - I couldn't believe my luck.

Omg!! That exact thing happened to me. My dad was a physics teacher and we went through past papers before the exam. All the questions from the night before were in the exam.

This shouldn’t be allowed to happen at all, especially for a final year paper.

In my previous University, all exam papers were required to be approved by at least one external examiner but I’m guessing corners have been cut due to Covid.

If this is discovered and raised at an exam board meeting, I think the lecturer concerned will have to account for their actions. At least in a ‘good’ University, this should happen.

However, this isn’t your problem to solve, so in your shoes, I’d probably keep quiet unless directly asked about it by a senior member of staff.

I was very conscientious in my studying for my Uni finals and trawled back through past papers. There was one question I was struggling with and I went to the lecturer to clarify. he was a bit horrified that I'd gone so far back. Lo and behold the question had been recycled for the final exam.

I got a first.

You did nothing wrong. Practising past papers is not cheating. It's the lecturer's issue if they're recycling questions exactly.

Wrong thread! Ignore, have reported for deletion, sorry.

By the way, is the lecturer necessarily lazy, or is there any chance that it might've just been a huge error?

Something similar happened to me when I was reading a little-studied classical language. The passages we read were taken from a website, which our lecturer pointed us to.

The readings were obviously graded, so I translated the next few as practice for the exam. I think I might have checked my translations as well against published English translations. Of course one of these was our unseen passage.

I did feel bad, but everyone else doing the subject could have done the same thing. I did worry the invigilator by walking out an hour early, though! 🤣

I've also had the "just because this passage is in the mock doesn't mean it won't be in the real thing" hint as well. I made sure I revised it loads!

I always spent ages on past papers when doing exams and it pays off. It sounds like this worked for the original poster and people who did not bother will not have done as well.

However if the mark scheme is that no more than 50% of people get over 60% or something like that the fact an exam is easy might mean marks are lower as a result.

thanks for all the advice.

he’s copied them from a website called oxford learninglink though - it’s not like a past paper where they’re similar, i mean every single question is literally word for word. it seems so lazy :s

🤐

the website is for teachers however it says enhance student learning with practice quizzes. not use the practice quizzes and then use them as official exams!