Now, there's a pretty good chance that some of the students probably knew that Quinn was a lazy professor, who just used testbank questions, rather than writing his own. That's the kind of information that tends to get around. But it's still not clear that using testbank questions to study is really an ethical lapse. Taking sample tests is a good way to practice for an exam and to learn the subject matter. And while those 200 students "confessed," it seems like they did so mainly to avoid getting kicked out of school -- not because they really feel they did anything wrong -- and I might have to agree with them.
We've seen plenty of stories over the years about professors trying to keep up with modern technology -- and I recognize that it's difficult to keep creating new exams for classes. But in this case, it looks like Prof. Quinn barely created anything at all. He just pulled questions from a source that the students had access to as well and copied them verbatim. It would seem that, even if you think the students did wrong here, the Professor was equally negligent. Will he have to sit through an ethics class too?
Judy Brophy on 07 Jul 10Here's a valuable set of resources for Health Sciences education: "60 public access virtual patient cases released under a Creative Commons licence for open use and reuse. Cases were created working with subject experts in workshops across the province. Using the open-source OpenLabyrinth platform the PINE project has a research and development theme investigating common simulation, gaming and narrative patterns in educational case design. This is facilitated by the use of the Vue topic mapping toolset that allows authors to create visual representations of activities and decision making processes."
