Without being explicitly coerced into doing something "illegal" (cheating in this case) I don't see how there could ever be a case to make that this is immoral. The students are cheating of their own free will. Case closed.
If professor (or TA) made announcement along the lines of "Don't go to Quizlet and don't download my past exams from there", maybe you'd have a point.. but they did not.
And many of those solutions are bad ones. They may contain B.S., wrong answers, and things students didn't learn with the class resources. If you copy/paste one of the solutions, you may evade detection and earn a "C".
Just to be absolutely clear: it doesn't matter; even if it was "entrapment", it's not necessarily unethical. Plenty of western countries don't recognize entrapment defenses. But it's also just not entrapment.
Ever since these students were 9 years old, everyone around them including (and especially) those in public education have told them that they need to go to college and get a degree or they'd be destitute and living in a ghetto.
Then they get there and college is even more absurd than public school ever was. They sit in a giant lecture hall listening to these people who don't live in the real world with the rest of us talk about things that do not matter (how many credits were for something other than electives or your major when you went?), threatening to flunk them if they can't jump through pointless hoops.
So, they go back to the dorm after class, and do research the best way they know how, and they find relevant study materials. Did he catch them smuggling the answers into class on a phone, or written in microscopic print on the inside of the rims of their glasses? Were they copying someone else's tests? Did they pay a lookalike ringer to sit in on the exam for them?
Hell no. They did what they were supposed to do. They found what they thought were the correct answers, and went over them enough that they could remember them during the test.
Why would anyone bother to go to this trouble? Because they were coerced. They've been coerced since they were children. He doesn't get a free pass because someone else volunteered to do the coercion for him.
I might be a little more forgiving if they were philosophy majors. If that were the case, then presumably they chose this field of study, and the class itself is relevant to that such that they should be putting in more effort... but even in that case, it is sufficient to fail them, because the low scores are their only real failing. Even then they haven't cheated.
You learn by knowing the material, and if you know the material, you don’t have to cheat
Now you can come up with all kind circumstances that make it hard on the students, as you do in your comment, but that’s another discussion entirely and imo outside the scope.
The article says the test was take home, meaning in a practical sense, they could access any resources they wanted while taking the test. They did not need to memorize material as your comment suggests, and would have had the opportunity to copy answers.
> Were they copying someone else's tests?
Yes. They were copying what they thought were a previous student's answers to the same test.
It's fucking multiple choice. If they got correct answers, then their answers would be identical to previous student's correct answers, by definition.
If doing that is cheating, then only the first students to ever get those questions on a test could pass it.
There's some sort of widespread mental illness affecting a large percentage of the population, such that apparently so many of you see this as cheating.
You get that, right? If you learn the answers to questions that end up appearing on the test prior to the test commencing, and you put those answers down on the test because you have memorized them (you know them in other words), this can't ever be cheating. That's not what "cheating" means.
If the point of the test is to check that students understand the material, and if students aren't allowed to look at the answers of previous tests ("looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating"), then memorizing the correct answers to previous tests is cheating.
Give me a break. They cheated. Case closed.
this whole comment unfortunately has taken quite a liberty with its defense of the students and perceived "due diligence".