I would have made this story an ethics quiz if I wasn’t so certain of the answer.
Garret Merriam, associate professor of philosophy at Sacramento State University, was curious about how many of his students would cheat on his Introduction to Ethics course take-home final exam. First he checked Google to see if some of the questions on his upcoming exam were already online, and found a copy of one of his previous final exams on the website Quizlet, which allows users to upload exam questions and answers to its site to help students cheat. (Mental note: Make Quizlet an Unethical Website Of the Month).
After emailing a request to Quizlet to take down his exam (they did), he had an inspiration. He created and uploaded to the sitet a copy of his planned final, consisting entirely of multiple choice questions, with not just wrong answers but obviously wrong answers. “My thinking was that anyone who gave a sufficient number of those same answers would be exposing themselves, not only as someone who cheated by looking up the final online, but who didn’t even pay enough attention in class to notice how wrong the answers were,” he wrote later.
Aficionados of fine film-making will immediately recognize the scheme as borrowed from “Animal House,” where the evil preppy Omega Theta Pi fraternity tricks the members of Delta House, which they knew was planning on stealing the answer sheet to a psychology mid-term exam, by planting a fake answer sheet with the wrong answers. The Delta House members all flunk the test, and hilarity ensues.
When the professor’s ethics students turned in their finals, the he calculated that “40 out of 96 students looked at and used the planted final for at least a critical mass of questions.” When he confronted those students, most of them confessed. Professor Merriam then discussed his sting on Twitter, and was surprised to find that many found him to be the unethical one:
As far as I can tell, their argument seems to boil down to the claim that my actions were deceptive or dishonest. I was accused of ‘entrapment’ and ‘honey-potting.’ More than a few seemed to think that my transgression was as bad or even worse than my students’. They suggested I should have just taken the copy of my test down and left it at that. As far as I can tell most of these people are not teachers of any kind, and none of them seemed to teach philosophy, ethics, or humanities.
Now his confidence is shaken. “Maybe (as the saying goes) I am the asshole here,” he writes. “But I would take that possibility a lot more seriously if that were the judgment of my immediate peers (philosophers at least, if not specifically ethicists), and even more so still if those peers could articulate an argument beyond simplistic accusations of dishonesty or ‘entrapment.’’”
Relax, professor. As I’m sure you know, what you did was pure and valid utilitarianism in action. Yes, your fake test was a lie, but it was a lie that could harm no one, while exposing and punishing unethical conduct that would be harmful. Good grades achieved by cheating harm the students who do not cheat. Students who graduate while employing dishonest means have degrees that mislead future employers. In addition, your trick revealed a problem that you, your school, and your profession needs to understand and address.
The Twitter-users who condemned your trap need to take your course.
Or read Ethics Alarms.
_______________
Pointer: Althouse
Ethics Alarms 
Okay, why is studying from prior exams unethical? I get that students shouldn’t be uploading the professors’ materials but, assuming the exams are available online and not purloined, I don’t see an ethics breach. Hell, I did it all the time in law school and college – there was no way I could have wrapped my brain around trig without working through tons of sample questions. During law school, I used model/mock exam questions to study for all kinds of course tests. They were not the current exams used by the professors, but when I studied for my Oil & Gas exam, for example, I used a friend’s Texas Bar Exam materials including the outlines and the model exams and answers. How was I to know that the professor used the same questions in his final exam? I had no idea he did that and it certainly was not common knowledge from my other colleagues that he was going to do that. Did using materials published by the State Bar or other sources used to prepare for the bar exam to study for my final courses’ final exams during my entire law school breach an ethical line? I doubt it.
Looking for the answers to an upcoming multiple choice test that is take-home, and copying the answers for your use on the test?
I think this is key. I think the educational establishment will recognize that the comfort they’ve developed from the a href=”https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/06/lockdowns-a-policy-disaster.php”>disastrous covid-era lockdowns will have to come to an end. More classes are online – our oldest is about to be an in-person freshman at college and a bunch of her classes are *online*. More tests are done at home or via other remote means.
All of this will have to end and classes and exams must be in person if educators and the general populace want to get serious about education again.
https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2023/06/lockdowns-a-policy-disaster.php
If they were published by the state bar, they were intended to be available. If a former student publishes them without permission, that is cheating.
Why people think former students know all the correct answers is an interesting question. The professor posted all the real questions, and instead of using them as a study guide, people copied the answers without checking to see if they were correct. That is unethical, but also idiotic. If you are going to cheat, at least do due diligence to ensure you are doing a good job at it.
That sounds right. Permissive use would control. If this professor never allowed or consented to the publication then it is a cheating problem.
jvb
When’s the last time Jay Wolman or Red Pill Ethics commented?
And Aaron Paschall?
Modern Knight?
Alexander Cheezem… chase martinez?
Chase: 2017. Has it been that long?
AC: also August 2021. He has sent in story ideas since then. He’s kind of a narrow issue commenter. Speaking of that: I sure miss zoebrain.
I thought she replies once in a blue moon. She replied to the Charles Manson cultist post I thought?
She did! First time since last September! I missed it.
May, 2017. How time flies.
Three days ago! https://ethicsalarms.com/2023/06/03/dear-april-no-dont-have-children-your-letter-proves-you-are-too-dumb-to-be-a-responsible-parent/
Red Pill: August, 2021. I know both Red Pill and Jay personally. They’re around and not mad or anything.
I’m going to disagree on this one. I have no sympathy for students who cheated (if that’s what they did: see below), but their guilt doesn’t mean that the prof is—if I might be forgiven a brief lapse into Reddit-speak—Not the Asshole. First off, it’s consequentialism—the ethics of what he did would be the same if no one cheated. Secondly, it strikes me as pretty much a classic “ends justify the means” scenario.
This also seems to be assuming facts not in evidence. (Is that a real legal term, or is it reserved for verbal sparring matches between Hamilton Burger and Perry Mason?) I tried to find the university’s policy, which he claims to have linked to (but didn’t), and finally gave up. But the default position, especially but not exclusively in students’ minds, is that take-home exams are intended to be “open book” unless explicitly stated to the contrary. Perhaps these restrictions were made clear to students, but if not, then this is indeed a serious violation of ethics on the part of someone who claims to be an authority on the subject.
By the way, I’ve been at this game a long time, and I have literally never heard of a take-home multiple-choice exam, let alone in a field like philosophy. I confess that without knowing more about the situation, my first temptation is to say that this guy is pedagogically inept, either stupid or lazy. (¿Porque no los dos?) But that would be a different kind of ethical failure than what we’re discussing here.
It’s also important to mention that Quizlet is not a “cheating site” just because Professor Merriam says it is. Unlike a lot of sites that are clearly designed to enable plagiarism, for example, it is intended to help students study, quiz themselves, etc. The fact that it can be used to cheat is no more relevant than the fact that kitchen knives have been used as murder weapons. The knife-manufacturer is not responsible for that, and I committed no offense by slicing up the veggies for ratatouille last night.
I have never used Quizlet directly, but students in my classes and dramaturgs on my productions have occasionally used the site for presentations in class or in rehearsal. But the way Quizlet operates brings us to the most serious problem, I think. The point is that students in Merriam’s class aren’t the only ones to see that exam with the fake answers. His students might be cheating (by the way, did they admit to cheating or simply to accessing Quizlet, which he determined to be cheating?) but the student taking a similar course at the University of Northern South Dakota at Hoople is not.
That student isn’t trying to cheat, merely to study for the Ethics final. “Oh, hey, over on Quizlet there’s this final exam with all the answers for a course at Sacramento State. I bet they covered the same stuff we did. Let me check this out!” And that totally innocent (though perhaps not too bright) student is going to suffer from Merriam’s smug little gambit.
Cheating is, alas, endemic, and fighting against it is rather like Cú Chulainn fighting the waves. ChatGPT and similar “advances” make me glad I retired when I did. But I had a pretty good reputation as a scourge of plagiarists and other cheats. I get it. Really, I do. But there are limits.
I used to play devil’s advocate in class discussion not infrequently. And I’d sometimes distribute a copy of the previous year’s exam. Only about 20% of the test was ever multiple choice, but sometimes I’d repeat a question… sort of. It would read exactly the same, with the same possible answers, except that instead of asking for which of the events happened first, for example, I’d ask for what happened last. Anyone who just remembered that the answer to that question was “the death of Elizabeth I” last year (without actually knowing why) would get it wrong when the correct answer is now “John Dryden is named poet laureate.”
I’m completely unapologetic about that. That said, I would never, ever intentionally supply a student with the incorrect answer to an objective question. Because… wait for, ethics professor… that would be unethical, irrespective of the intent.
Finally, I notice that Merriam makes a big deal out of the fact that “most of these people [his critics] are not teachers of any kind, and none of them seemed to teach philosophy, ethics, or humanities.” OK, I confess. I’ve never as much as taken a course in a Philosophy Department. On the other hand, I’ve coordinated a course with a colleague in Philosophy, lecturing several times to her students as well as mine; I’ve got a chapter coming out in a book with the word “philosophy” in its title; and I’ve taught humanities courses in six different decades, including spending a fair amount of time wrestling with the likes of Confucius, Chuang Tzu, Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Marx, Kierkegaard, Camus, Sartre, and Foucault (to name a few).
If, Professor Merriam, you consider these insufficient credentials for me to have an opinion about your ploy, then, to borrow a phrase from one of my favorite bloggers, Bite Me. Oh, and BTW, ESH.
Thanks for synthesizing my thoughts, Curmie. You, however, are more eloquent than I was. I tend to agree with your points. If this test were a take home test and the professor said it was not open book, then the problem lies with the students. If the professor didn’t clarify the rules then it is on him.
jvb
Great argument. Two things: 1) Sometimes the ends do justify the means: that’s the whole idea of utilitarianism. 2) I admit to being something of an extremist on this issue: I think take-home tests and open book tests are invitations to cheaters, and are unethical teaching devices. I think I’ve written here before about a take-home, self-timed test in Constitutional Law I took part in. I played by the rules: as as far as I could determine, I was almost the only one in the class who did. I protested to the professor both before and after the exam, to no avail.
I agree with you if we’re talking about objective exams with “correct” answers. Essay exams play by a different set of rules, and I sometimes allowed them to be take-home and/or open book. The grading standards would change, of course.
In one class in particular I took a class vote on whether the final would be on-site or take-home; classes opted for take-homes about 2/3 of the time: more than half but less than I might have expected.
Where would you place a law school exam along that spectrum? I can bullshit on almost any topic (that’s one plus of going to Harvard); I did fine on a dew ethics exams where I hadn’t read most of the material and went to just a couple of classes. Most law school exams, however, required knowing law, cases and material; the questions could be researched.
I’m not sure I understand what you’re asking, but let me try this…
The closest I ever came to a law school exam was on the final for an International Law course I took as a college sophomore back when I was a Government major. It was on-site, with a time limit. For one of the questions, the prof constructed an international dispute with a half dozen or so areas of contention; our job was to present the argument for Country X, identifying precedents A, B, and C as important and arguing why precedents D, E, and F weren’t as relevant.
If what you’re testing is whether the student can cite specific cases that help or hurt X’s position, this is the way to go. Bur if you want to know the strategy employed by a student with a chance to think a little longer, or to cite specific wording of a decision, etc.–the equivalent of a brief–then a take-home version might be more advisable.
The take-home version actually eliminates cheating if it’s perfectly acceptable, even encouraged, to consult outside sources. There can even be safeguards in today’s technological age: the question can only be opened online, and the completed essay must be submitted within a specific timeframe after the question is revealed. Good students might not remember all the details of what they’d read, but they’d have an advantage over those who hadn’t done the work because they’d know where to look.
Of course, this system has its drawbacks, too, most notably in the potential for plagiarism. As my grandfather would say, “what you make on the melons, you lose on the banan.”
Well, the distinction between a multiple choice exam, where all that is asked for are specific, factual answers; an essay test, where the idea is to test the student’s ability to offer a well-reasoned and written answer using the facts and principles taught in the course; and a law school exam, where the student is being asked for specific references to support the answer. Using answers on line for a multiple choice take-home exam seems obviously unethical—cheating—to me. Using outside sources for a take-home essay exam is, absent plagiarism, fair. For a law school exam, I think it’s a mix of the two. A take home, open book exam in law school is a test of legal research as much as anything else, and then a test of applying authority.
When I was taking classes to finish up my degree, there were a number that had take home final exams. From my experience, the professors used the ‘take home’ part to make the exams much harder than they would if they were in person, closed book exams. I actually had no problem with that — I figured it went with the territory and with an untimed exam. Now that was also pre Internet, so anything you wanted to look up — there’s the library.
You also make an excellent point regarding students at other schools who might be looking at this exam, and using it as a form of study guide.