I'm going to rise to the bait on this one and pick apart every piece of this.

> I think it's bizarre and irrational to tell someone "you must know the answers to pass this test, but you're not allowed to study by looking up answers to questions you might find on the test, if you do that it's cheating".

Nobody said that. Ever.

> If a person learns the answer to a question that ends up on a final exam years later in their future, but they learned the answer to that question "the wrong way", are they still cheating? If my 10 year old stumbles on that site, reads a question and remembers it for the next 9 years... should he, on the first day of class confess to his professor that he learned the answer the wrong way so that he can be expelled for pre-emptive cheating?

No. Nobody claimed this was cheating. But nobody in the article did this. The professor planted the poisoned answers at the end of the class (we know this because the professor said that the questions varied from year to year).

But even if these answers had been posted in advance and someone had learned them 9 years prior, they were clearly in conflict with the material that was taught in the class and provided in the study guide. If you're attempting to pass a class without actually taking it, then yes, you're cheating. There's a process for that in most colleges.

And if you did learn the material ahead of time and there's a discrepancy with the professor, yes you should talk to them about it. If I learned that 2 + 2 is 4 and a professor started telling me it was 5, I'd be sure to have a conversation with them to avoid problems during the test, just like this.

> Now, you might argue that they put down wrong answers. And this is true. That happened because he deliberately contaminated the study materials with wrong answers. Who can blame students who learn the wrong facts when the professor himself is deliberately teaching them the wrong facts as a gotcha?

Again, not what happened. The professor posted wrong answers to a site known for providing cheating materials. The professor taught them the correct facts and provided a study guide with the correct facts. The official study materials were not contaminated.

And it was a take-home test. The students chose to use an unrelated resource that matched the format of the test instead of the study materials which they could literally have right next to them.

> If he wanted to encourage them to learn all the answers to all the questions (and not just those questions likely to be on a test), he could... just for instance... not do multiple choice. Or make sure he always has unique questions on his exams, every year (well, assuming there are ever more than 40 questions in a liberal arts class, imagine paying $1600/credit-hour for 4 months that only has 40 noteworthy questions).

The teacher actually mentions that the questions change from year to year due to various factors. I assume that some years they don't get to cover all of the material. Multiple choice is fine for this kind of thing, since it's almost made clear that there are other components to the students grade (the article mentioned that a zero on the final doesn't automatically mean an F in the class).

And it's a test. When have you ever taken a test that covered all of the material you learned in the class? All tests are a sample representation of all of the material, whether multiple choice or essay form.

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I left out a ton of your post that was intentionally inflammatory or just plain condescending.

It's also worth pointing out that 2/3 of the class admitted to cheating, one was on the fence, and the rest are still being determined. So a lot of your points end up being moot.

The students cheated.