Colleagues cluelessly stealing your assessments right in front of you?

[Aster]

So one of my colleagues recently reported that he was walking into one of his classrooms that he'd just prepped for a practicum-based exam. All of the student seats had individual questions taped to the desks, so that students would rotate from seat to seat as they completed their exam. I don't know how something like this would work with COVID protocols in place, but what the hey.

Anyway, as my colleague walks into his prepped room (he had stepped out briefly to check on something), lo and behold, Professor X is now in the room. And Professor X has his cellphone out and is taking pictures of all of my colleague's exam questions, saying "Oh Yeah This is a Great Question!" And then he starts gushing to my colleague about how happy he is that he doesn't have to write so much of his own assessment from scratch, but will just use some of my colleague's stuff.

Yeah, this guy is literally stealing my colleague's assessment questions to use on his own assessment. And he doesn't seem to understand just how angry that he has just made my colleague (who is now going to rewrite all new assessment questions).

WTF man WTF. Have any forum readers ever had this happen to you? Is there any circumstance or academic discipline where something like this is perceived to be acceptable?

[the_geneticist]

Just back away.

Yes, it's a bit unprofessional and weird that Professor X was happily taking pictures of all of the exam questions without asking, but it's not your mess to step in.

[mamselle]

But it's also just wrecked exam security.

If it were a chem lab, Professor sticky-camera-fingers had better hope something doesn't light up WHOOSH! behind him.

I don't know if it's reportable or not, but it's certainly of questionable judgement.

M.

[eigen]

I can't really picture this because my departments culture is that we all share our assessments with each other to use / build off of / etc.

[Caracal]

I can't really picture this because my departments culture is that we all share our assessments with each other to use / build off of / etc.

I guess the potential issue is that it could make cheating easier? Not sure I really see why this require your colleague to write all new exam questions though. If cheating is the concern than shouldn't he be doing new exams every semester and for each one of his classes? If anyone really wants my essay questions they are welcome to them...

[ergative]

When I was in grad school, I fessed up to a professor that I had seen the homework assignment before in undergrad, because one of Grad Prof's former students had gotten a job at my Undergrad U and used that assignment. Grad Prof then asked what other assignments Undergrad Prof had assigned me and it turned out Undergrad Prof had stolen two or three of the assignments that Grad Prof had given him, Undergrad Prof, when he was a student, and Grad Prof was still using those assignments when I arrived.

As I recall Grad Prof told me to just do them as normal and trusted to my honor not look back at my years-old Undergrad U solutions.

I can't say I blame Undergrad Prof. They were really great assignments.

[marshwiggle]

I can't really picture this because my departments culture is that we all share our assessments with each other to use / build off of / etc.

I guess the potential issue is that it could make cheating easier? Not sure I really see why this require your colleague to write all new exam questions though. If cheating is the concern than shouldn't he be doing new exams every semester and for each one of his classes? If anyone really wants my essay questions they are welcome to them...

Yeah, that was the part I didn't get either. Unless CopyProf is going to be giving an exam BEFORE ColleagueProf then it's not going to affect ColleagueProf's exam, unless CopyProf posts the questions or something, in which case it's an entirely different issue.

[Caracal]

When I was in grad school, I fessed up to a professor that I had seen the homework assignment before in undergrad, because one of Grad Prof's former students had gotten a job at my Undergrad U and used that assignment. Grad Prof then asked what other assignments Undergrad Prof had assigned me and it turned out Undergrad Prof had stolen two or three of the assignments that Grad Prof had given him, Undergrad Prof, when he was a student, and Grad Prof was still using those assignments when I arrived.

As I recall Grad Prof told me to just do them as normal and trusted to my honor not look back at my years-old Undergrad U solutions.

I can't say I blame Undergrad Prof. They were really great assignments.

I've never understood thinking of any kind of class material as intellectual property. I've never used anyone else's exam questions before, but I've certainly used other people's writing assignments. It's a pain to craft that kind of thing from scratch, so when I've decided I wanted to add in an extra assignment or replace something I've done before, I sometimes ask a friend or colleague if the have something they've had success with they could send to me. I've usually modified it, but its a lot easier to start with something and make some adjustments.

Unless something was posted online, I wouldn't just take it without asking from their class, but that's mostly just about politeness. I would be a little confused if I found someone in my department was using my stuff without ever talking to me, but I wouldn't be mad about it.

[evil_physics_witchcraft]

I agree with other responses. Don't put your foot in it.

It is concerning because, yes, exam security may have been potentially thrown out the window (Ah, a Physics joke!). Anyway, at our  campus, we work together to build some (not all) common assessments and try to protect them. Unfortunately, there was an incident (in Bio. or Microb.) where a prof. posted the entire solution online for a shared exam.

[Puget]

Sure, he should have asked, but it's pretty normal to share teaching materials including exams so I wouldn't see this as a big deal.

[Aster]

Oh, I wasn't planning on confronting the idiot professor and telling him to do his own job. I was just wondering if others had ever experienced such clueless behavior from their own colleagues before. You ask before you take. Or you just don't take. Or that you get the fudge out of another professor's classroom while he/she is using it.

I also believe that many professors just don't understand how incredibly common it is now to having unauthorized copies of your assessments kicking around on the internet. I've found that very few professors ever check, and so they blithely believe that everything's okay. Because unlike the typical college student, it's far rarer for professional academics with PhD's to have cheated their way through college courses. But most surveys of student cheating in college course show extremely high cheating frequencies of between 60-80% of polled students freely admitting to the practice, and the numbers just keep going up every year.

It's easy to pull up unauthorized copies of one's material on the internet, if one teaches enough students long enough. I perform these searches a few times every year, to look for leaks with my own stuff, and also for leaks with the faculty that I supervise and/or might collaborate with. I find such leaks all the time. Heck, I can still pull up the entire exam key that an entire department is still using for their midterm exam on another campus. I have mentioned this to the faculty in that department more than once, but nope, they still use that same exact exam every single year, and have the (way over-high) 95% student pass rates to show for it. With such high pass rates one would think that the pass rates of those nursing students on their state licensing exams would also be sky-high, but alas, they are much much lower.

[teach_write_research]

So one of my colleagues recently reported that he was walking into one of his classrooms that he'd just prepped for a practicum-based exam. All of the student seats had individual questions taped to the desks, so that students would rotate from seat to seat as they completed their exam. I don't know how something like this would work with COVID protocols in place, but what the hey.

Anyway, as my colleague walks into his prepped room (he had stepped out briefly to check on something), lo and behold, Professor X is now in the room. And Professor X has his cellphone out and is taking pictures of all of my colleague's exam questions, saying "Oh Yeah This is a Great Question!" And then he starts gushing to my colleague about how happy he is that he doesn't have to write so much of his own assessment from scratch, but will just use some of my colleague's stuff.

Yeah, this guy is literally stealing my colleague's assessment questions to use on his own assessment. And he doesn't seem to understand just how angry that he has just made my colleague (who is now going to rewrite all new assessment questions).

WTF man WTF. Have any forum readers ever had this happen to you? Is there any circumstance or academic discipline where something like this is perceived to be acceptable?

I'd be more irritated at him modeling behavior I would *not* want students doing! I'm guessing the students do not get to come in and take photos of the exam questions. WTF man for certain - just ask your colleague if they could send you the document. Ok, taking a general photo of the room setup since that seems to be key is sort of reasonable, but I'd still ask, while commenting on dear colleague's creativity, effort, and expertise since it's clearly a lot of work.

Do we have a thread for academics acting oddly? I expect we've all got stories.

[Langue_doc]

I'd be annoyed too. There's a difference between sharing and appropriating someone else's work. Walking into a colleague's classroom especially one prepped for an exam and then taking pictures of the actual questions without asking is not normal behavior.

[apl68]

I can't really picture this because my departments culture is that we all share our assessments with each other to use / build off of / etc.

Me neither.  Librarians are normally very free in sharing ideas with colleagues.  Even librarians think it's nice to ask first, though. 

[jerseyjay]

I guess some of this is field or discipline specific--it sounds as if STEM people are more worried about this than I would be.

I mean, it is incredibly rude to do what the guy did. But what worries more about it is it bespeaks a general state of cluelessness or anti-sociability instead of any particular attitude towards assessment. I mean, it is not clear from the story whether he is going to plop the questions directly into his own exam or if he is going to use the exam as a model for his own. I would also think it really weird if somebody decided to assign the exact same books I did for a class or used the same syllabus. Neither of these is really dishonest itself, just strange.

I have colleagues ask (and have asked colleagues) to see their exams or assignments before. Sometimes I have used these verbatim, and sometimes I have adapted them. I also do not think that there are really any more original questions to be asked about the causes of the American Civil War or Othello (unless, say: Write an imaginary encounter between Jefferson Davis and Iago).

The key to preventing cheating is not to keep your assessments under lock and key, but to vary them regularly and try to write them specifically to the course material.  In most of my classes, I change the exam questions each time I teach the class, either by writing them from scratch or by alternating questions from previous classes.