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For example, if I teach a course in "How To Multiply", and on the final have ten multiplication problems, if the student memorizes the answers to those ten problems, he did not learn to multiply.
The professor said some of the planted answers were obviously wrong, if one knew the material at all. So no, memorizing the answers simply was not a substitute for learning the material.
I disagree with your conclusions.
You learn by getting the material, and that makes you pass the test. If you know a few items of the material in a checkbox kind of way, you haven’t learned.
None were in that class because they wanted mastery. They were in that class because if it wasn't a requirement for graduation, no one would take it.
To demand mastery of worthless material so that the university can charge them another $5000 in credits, fees, and overpriced-by-the-academic-publishing-cartel books is not asinine, it's criminal.
> For example, if I teach a course in "How To Multiply", and on the final have ten multiplication problems, if the student memorizes the answers to those ten problems, he did not learn to multiply.
If that happens, it means you are a lazy fraudulent teacher. You insist that they learn more than what is on your exam, but you continue to use the same exam because you have no work ethic. Perhaps instead of multiplication you should go teach ethics in the philosophy department, where that sort of thing is considered high performance.
> The professor said some of the planted answers were obviously wrong, if one knew the material at all.
I think that "obvious" means something completely different than "if you master a university-level field of study, you will then know that it is wrong".
Such a thing is, by definition, the very opposite of obvious. I don't know how to explain that to you so that you can understand. Your words make very little sense, it's as if you said "the snow was burning hot" or "that blue thing over there is red".
> I disagree with your conclusions.
This would be disappointing, but given that I'm no longer certain of what you even mean by "disagree" or "conclusions", it might be impolite of me to take that as something other than a compliment.
I've heard that one before - if you don't like the class, it's ok to cheat? If you want a certification, but don't want to do the work, it's ok to cheat? If you sign up to get a cert, that means you sign up to meet all the requirements of the cert, not just the ones you feel like.
> To demand mastery of worthless material so that the university can charge them another $5000 in credits, fees, and overpriced-by-the-academic-publishing-cartel books is not asinine, it's criminal.
If it's worthless, the honorable thing is not to sign up for it. Nobody made you.
> I don't know how to explain that to you so that you can understand.
No need to be rude. The article made it clear - it would be obvious to someone who attended the lectures and paid attention.
The mental gymnastics should qualify one for the not-for-abled Olympics.
sure, but giving some data from a previous test is in various ways a hint on what to study, so the conclusion that he is deliberately misleading students as to what they should study does have some limited merit.
The data was given on a site that students shouldn't have been accessing in the first place ("looking at other tests without the instructor’s permission counts as cheating"). It's not as if the teacher fed them these fake answers.
Studying requires you obtain mastery of all the material that might potentially be on the exam, in all its permutations. That's the entire point of testing: to force that kind of mastery, without imposing exams that take 4 full-time days to administer. So cheating is doubly immoral: it's dishonest, and it imposes costs on honest people.
The purpose is not to encourage less-than-sufficient studying or other preparation. E.g. "Oh it's take home so we can just cheat!", Or somehow deluding oneself into thinking the cheating is endorsed.
Examinations will just be more tightly locked down if some students continue to abuse the system.
Sure, you could look up previous exams for learning the topic, but you could as well just copy the answers. Given that the answers were [supposedly] obviously wrong and the cheating students still used them pretty clearly indicates that they were not using previous exams for studying, otherwise they would have noticed that the answers are wrong as they contradict what was taught in the lectures and what other sources say.
All that's left is rote memorization. Learn this fact, remember this principle in that scenario.
There is a vast gulf between memorizing stuff and understanding it. The basic goal of every education is understanding existing knowledge and being able to apply it, memorizing stuff is not enough and I guess you should not be able to pass exams without some level of understanding. Being able to go beyond the existing knowledge and having original ideas is not required unless you want to go into research.
Well, your argument is nonsense generally, but you have a fine future as an ethicist.