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?

Missing the point of the thread, but multiple choice? In your final year of uni? The lecturer has probably lost the will to live.

Even back on the old days lecturers used to recycle exam essay topics. We used to go through past papers and spot patterns and then gamble on which bits of syllabus to focus on. Would have been disastrous if we'd got it wrong. But we never did!

You're not doing anything wrong.

@uniadvice84747

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

That is just so bad.

i had this with a law Uni exam, questions were copied (though names changed) from one of the Q&A revision style books which gave example questions for every part of the syllabus and then model answers.

Wasn;t quite sure what to do, didn't report it in the end. Of course if i had copied any part of the model answer, I'd have been fladgged up for plagarism!

When I was at Uni it sometimes happened. Teachers re-used their own tests, but in the meantime the tests got online. In the end, if the teacher had 5-10 tests and someone went through all of them, it definitely was some work and revision. Could your instructor be an original author of the test in question?

At my very first exam, I went through some old questions the night before and there was one I had no clue what to do about. The next day I received exactly that one... It was skill application (construction of proof in math), so I managed to put it together in the end, but at first I felt like "oh really?"

And yes, sometimes you can guess questions before the test just by observation and knowledge, once I guessed all topics for my sister's music history exam, and while tutoring I had some success as well. Sometimes the teachers were trying to hint a lot, but still not everyone interpreted it correctly.
It isn't totally fair, as not everyone has family member/money for a fortune teller, but as far as you use publicly available resources, it is just a form of preparation.

one other thing we had was that the same lecturer would use the same questions as in past years.

So if you were diligent you could look at all past years AND then read their very detailed remarks on what students should have responded to the question, which factors a very good student would have touched on etc.

As exams are online, you could just open the new exam, say ag this is 2017 Q1 and look up what is needed!

@beastlyslumber

Missing the point of the thread, but multiple choice? In your final year of uni? The lecturer has probably lost the will to live.

MCQs can be very useful for testing breadth of knowledge. I would use them as, say 15% of an exam mark.

If you have ten key topics in a module, you can ask five in depth questions in an exam, students are typically requires to answer one or two. The savvy ones question spot and we are also encouraged to tell students what will come up now (thank you NSS). So an MCQ tests whether they bothered to listen to anything in the other 8-9 lectures and know anything about the actual field beyond the one topic they've revised for the essay q.

In this case it's poor practice though and should have been flagged in exam paper moderation processes.

A similar thing happened to me with a scholarship exam (asked the admin office whether I could have any past papers, they sent me 10 years' worth and I very quickly realised questions were being recycled). Yes, I got the scholarship.

It does sound like your lecturer is being lazy, but that's not your fault.

That is really really bad!

At uni we were given a few practice papers and in the lecturer she said "multiple choice questions are very hard to write"

By learning those off by heart it covered probably 85% of the actual exam, some of them were inverted though not all like for like.

@RincewindsHat

IDK. It happened in my final exam for my degree, the paper was composed of the exact same questions we'd done as pre-exam prep. Sadly I had not studied them closely as I'd figured they WOULDN'T be in the exam, so it didn't help me anyway!

One of our tutors GAVE us the questions. We'll she said she was giving us a list of the areas the questions would be in, and to revise more of them than we needed in case we didn't like the way the question was worded. The exam paper was exactly the same as the lost she gave us with words like "discuss" added to them!! It was a long time ago though.

I recall that in the week before my German 'O' level, at subject at which I did not excel, I asked my teacher during revision for some strange vocabulary. On the day of the exam when we got the paper in the Hall and she was reading through it almost all of those words cropped up, she gave me some very strange looks.

You were prepared - well done

@Jessicabrassica

Even back on the old days lecturers used to recycle exam essay topics. We used to go through past papers and spot patterns and then gamble on which bits of syllabus to focus on. Would have been disastrous if we'd got it wrong. But we never did! You're not doing anything wrong.

It was certainly the case for 'O' level Maths, which three Euclidean theorems would crop up, our teacher kept a list of them for every year to help the predictions!

Happened to me once. Did a mock exam in revision session with teacher. 2 hours later, walked into the exam to face the same question.

I guess there are only so many questions they can ask so don't feel bad!

I would cover your arse and notify your department pronto or you could be dragged in for a disciplinary investigation in the not too distant future.

Really poor form for the academic though, I agree.

Again is it definitely not an open book exam??

There will be an external examiner (or there should be) looking at this and the marks. Very poor practice.

@Winniewonka

Won't everyone else sitting the exam from your group also get 100% ? Whoever is marking the papers will surely realise something odd is going on.

Possibly/probably this. But it’s not your fault. You’ll just have to let it play out. If it became a real issue I guess they’ll discount the paper.

That is one seriously careless teacher!

Don't worry on your part, your goal is to pass.

And the main lesson of this thread is: always, always, always find past exam papers to help you revise. This situation clearly happens a lot!

Our lecturers would basically give us the questions 🙈 they’d be worded slightly differently but we’d always know the themes they were going to pick. Ours was an essay writing degree though, where you had to do a lot of critical thinking & comparing & contrasting different schools of thought.. so knowing the questions was not as helpful as it might seem. Useful but not a shoe in for getting good marks!

My A-Level biology teacher was OBSESSED with past papers. We did so many that it became very obvious which questions popped up most years & you could hedge your bets on what hadn’t featured for a couple years & might come up this one. I got 100% in all my biology A-Level papers 🙈 doing past papers works!

I presume you have checked the lecturer is not the author of the resource on Learning Link.

It looks to me like a paywall site (although I only looked out of curiosity and am not that familiar with it). Or do you just register?

I think it would present an interesting dilemma for an exam board, as presumably the external has approved the paper in good faith not knowing that it has either been submitted to Learning Link by the lecturer or lifted from there and you have revised papers on Learning Link in good faith, having gone out of your way to find resources to practice.

I genuinely don’t think many students would routinely use learning link over and above classroom resources but maybe it depends on the subject. It seems to me bad practice to take an exam from there rather than just practice or teaching resources, which I presume is how it is meant.

I think the exam board would have to scrap the whole exam, because you would have no way of knowing who had seen the paper before or not.

You knew the answers because you studied!
If you hadn't you wouldn't have seen it.