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?

@LuchiMangsho

As an academic if I did this I would be in a WHOLE heap of trouble.

This. I would be fucked

You should web archive the webpage you found the test questions on. If you finished very quickly compared to classmates and got a higher score, your university might question whether you cheated on the day. It will be helpful to have proof the questions were all available online if there is any kind of investigation.

@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.

every module has done multiple choice this and last year, it seems to be the covid thing. i totally agree though, i’d rather do proper exams in person

@RJnomore1

Again is it definitely not an open book exam??

our exams are all open book, as its online, 24 hours to do so of course you can refer to anything you like.

With MCQ tests it was a bit strange, though that was restricted to 2 hours, which went so fast and they were not true/false, that you couldn't google as such, more like here is 4 answers 1 is very correct, 2 are mostly correct and 1 is very wrong and you got scored on a range. I did get 92% on that, my best Uni score ever!

(some professional exams may be proctored to ensure no one cheats but most Uni exams are just 24 hour open book as logistically they can't do it any other way)

@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.

It depends on the subject - not radically different to setting coursework.

I recently completed a PGDip, and some of the modules were based on assignments, some were exams you downloaded, and uploaded within 48hrs. Obviously open-book exam, but you couldn’t have answered well unless you actually understood the topic - you wouldn’t know what to Google. Of course somebody else could have done it for me, but equally somebody else could have written up my PhD thesis, or indeed attended medical school placements for me.

I spent over 20yrs in HE, I became a bit of an expert on plagiarism, it is generally not well understood, even by academics.

You did not know what the questions were going to be. Nor did any other student. You were not given sight of your paper.

you, student A, did a LOT of revision, looking at all resources available. There will be other students who did likewise, Student X, OTOH, only did a minimum of revision and didn't really look in any great detail at the online resources suggested. Student X will not do as well as the students, like you, who followed their lecturers' advice and put in the work. (The night before a language exam I looked again at an old paper - exactly the same passage for translation was on my paper. If I hadn't done the last minute revision I wouldn't have the tricky bits nailed.)

I taught a science subject where there were clearly right and wrong answers, recognising that the answer to a question is "option B" because you have done so many examples that you've come across it before IS LEARNING. You have done the learning and have demonstrated that you've done the learning by getting the answers correct - and BECAUSE you've done the revision then you know the answers are correct.

There will be course learning outcomes that have to be demonstrated by the exam. With a MC format there are limited ways in which that can be implemented. eg When students frequently confuse two, related, concepts, and understanding the difference is crucial, a MC question to find out whether a student does understand the difference will necessarily look like past MC questions, sometimes down to the exact wording because the exact wording is important and precise.

The point of exams is to give students the opportunity to demonstrate what they know. Not to catch them out.

you did the work, you are reaping the rewards. relax.

@Gwenhwyfar

"Moral of story, if you put the work in and do all the practice questions - then yes things will seem awfully familiar. That’s the point. Practice makes perfect and hard work gets rewarded"

That's not how most exams work though.

Yes it is! An exam is literally a test to see if you've learned what you should have. Learn what you should have and you'll do better on the test.

Many of the anecdotes from PP’sare similar to some of my own as both student and lecturer, but miss the point. Everyone should enjoy their luck, and I think it is a valid approach for lecturers to exploit the possibility. It obviously worked with many of us who can still recall these episodes with delight.

The OP is talking about a multiple choice exam taken directly from a public site containing both questions and answers. As the exam was taken privately it is relevant that the answers consist of a single symbol. Even if exam security software was in place, other students could claim a single comfort break to download the answers onto phones, and glancing at a single symbol is hard to detect.

This is why I think the marks of strong, honest students (and lucky, honest students which is 100% fair) will be unfairly moderated by the marks of other students.
I, too, have re-used questions with minor changes and always told students (and with precision, referees) there would be a small amount of seen work on exams. That is a tool with which you may or may not agree. The OP has described something else entirely.

You've done nothing wrong !

This is going to sound batshit but when I was doing my English literature exam, I had a dream of what one of the long essay questions would be in the exam. When I woke up, I remembered exactly what the question was so I wrote it down and spent time composing a proper essay answer.

And yes you guessed it... on the day of the exam, it was the exact question that was in my dream. I pretty much rewrote the essay I had already made before.
I got an A for my English literature a level.
Was it unfair on the others ? Probably. But did I do anything wrong? Nope!

I'm surprised the university is allowed to use multiple-choice questions to assess a subject in an award year.

MCQs are fine in the early years as low-stakes assessments in the early stages of a subject to test understanding of key concepts but are absolutely not appropriate in an award year.

Depends on the subject.

@KerryWeaver

I'm surprised the university is allowed to use multiple-choice questions to assess a subject in an award year.

MCQs are fine in the early years as low-stakes assessments in the early stages of a subject to test understanding of key concepts but are absolutely not appropriate in an award year.

Award years have been both second and third year UG at all the places I've taught. MCQs are completely appropriate to assess breadth of knowledge at any level. We have rules on how much of the weighting they can be, but they really do assess a wider knowledge base and don't rely on writing ability to demonstrate knowledge. They are a useful part of an assessment toolkit at any level, but they do need to be constructed and moderated appropriately.

That is particularly lazy of the lecturer.

One of my uni courses had an exam that was pretty much guaranteed to have a choice of eight questions, one for each section of the course. You had to do 3 questions. The questions in each section would basically be one of two different questions, but you could work out which one because it would be which ever one they hadn’t set as the continual assessment essay for that section. I looked through the past papers, worked out what my exam would be and prepped three questions. I was unimpressed with the course before the exam, but even more so after. Did well, though!

If you are accused of cheating all the other students will be too. Assuming they all studied the same questions

Moral of story, if you put the work in and do all the practice questions - then yes things will seem awfully familiar. That’s the point. Practice makes perfect and hard work gets rewarded

Actually, the moral of the story is turn up for all the classes and you should be able to pass. Hardly a difficult concept.

OP,

I’ve been thinking more about your situation.

If no student speaks up, very high marks could be moderated downward by 10% or more: this very occasionally happened at my old School in a Russell Group Uni. If you are on a 3 yr course with 2 yrs of marks counting towards your degree, it is not impossible that someone’s degree classification could be affected - considering borderline cases can be excruciating.

I really hope some student(s) will approach a sympathetic academic as I outlined earlier. A number of posts have been discussing the merits or otherwise of MCQ exams. I would leave that out. The issue is the use of seen, externally sourced questions with answers for a privately taken MCQ exam. Issues are
(a) the entire exam sourced from Oxford Learning Links; (b) all questions already used in course (arguably a judgment call but a pretty poor one at uni, I think); (c) answers readily available at OLL and students know this; (d) ease of cheating given (c), exam format and exam conditions.

IMO honest students have a right to not be penalised with downward moderated marks; but how to do this without rewarding cheaters I do not know. However, by bringing this to the attention of your School you can prevent it happening again.

In case the School decides to investigate, having brought the issue up is likely to count in your favour. Best wishes

I did an OU exam about 14 years ago and something similar happened. We’d been sent a revision book and there were practice questions with model answers. I studied it like mad until exam day. I get into the hall and turn over the paper. There’s 3 sections and in each section, you have to pick one question to answer. In the first two sections, one of the questions was almost identical to the one in the revision guides! Everyone was talking about it after the exam and wondering if there had been a mistake. I basically dragged up everything I could remember and got a really good mark.

Surely it's just lazy to copy an exam, it's plagiarism!

I have to say one of the issues is the workload that many lecturers are facing is unsustainable. Sadly when doing consistent 60 hour weeks and struggling to keep on top of stuff corners will be cut by some while they keep their fingers crossed and hope nobody realises.

You’ve done absolutely nothing wrong. Tutor sent you link to site with practice questions. You chose to do all the questions/revise using that resource. Tutor has chosen questions from that site. How is that your fault in any way? Not everyone will get 100% as some will have ignored tutor and won’t have used practice questions, some will have not remembered etc.
On first read I thought you’d looked for practice questions online and found the one the tutor had copied by pure chance. Again absolutely nothing wrong with that. You are a student prepping for an exam.
I wouldn’t say a thing. You have done the work and it has paid off.

@CovidCorvid

I have to say one of the issues is the workload that many lecturers are facing is unsustainable. Sadly when doing consistent 60 hour weeks and struggling to keep on top of stuff corners will be cut by some while they keep their fingers crossed and hope nobody realises.

There's also NSS pressure. Everyone knows that the best prediction of satisfaction is high grades.

Lecturers are also under pressure to 'add value' i.e. a straight A A-level student should be doing better at uni, so low grades are not encouraged.

It could also be this fell through the cracks, maybe they wrote the q's down and forgot they weren't a previous convenors question set and didn't realise they were online.

Could well be a lazy lecturer but the pressures lecturers are under are insane and not very visible to students.

My dc's university exams (science) are so complex and detailed, there's no way that the information could be found online in the time given. You have to know your stuff in order to be able to have a stab at the answer, and for multiple choice, there are not always only 4 options, and many are similar. Plus their marks are then statistically adjusted for guessing. Even open book exams are challenging as again there is so much content that it would be impossible to complete in the time if you weren't already VERY familiar with your very comprehensive notes.

I agree with PP's that pressures on lecturers are unacceptable. But these questions are taken word for word from Oxford Online Learning Tools. Unless the lecturer wrote the OOLT quizzes, there is plagiarism on top of the other issues.

@Theflying19, the questions and answers are available online bundled together in a resource well known to the students, and they took the online exam privately!

@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.

There are plenty of ways to examine knowledge without bookwork.

I have a maths background and I am currently take professional exams. Since the move to online exams and an open book format, the exam papers have become much more difficult.

No amount of flicking through the notes and past papers helps.