By Amber Roos
— A recent Logic exam was invalidated after suspected academic fraud. As a result, students taking the Logic course will have to resit the exam on June 3 with additional measures.
Bluma Brecher, second-year Humanities student, explains that“It was a multiple-choice online exam that was posted in the evening. Basically, the results turned out to be unrealistically high. They think that some students plagiarised or committed fraud by helping each other.”
Zuzanna Sarlej, first-year Social Science major, is one of the students currently taking Logic. “It took longer than usual to get our results. Later we found out this was because the teachers noticed statistical disparities between our current results and our previous results and also results from previous years,” she says. Due to the unexpected results of the test, the Board of Examiners was involved and asked to investigate the results. On May 13, all Logic students received an email stating that the BoE had decided to invalidate the exam. Because of this, all students will now have to retake the exam.
This situation led to much confusion and unclarity. The Head of Logic invited all students and Logic teachers to participate in a Zoom meeting on May 14. The meeting was dedicated to questions regarding the decision made by the BOE. Ina Kronevska, first-year Science major, was present at the meeting. “The very relevant and important questions that students had were always answered with responses that really did not lead to any more clarification,” she says. Besides the official announcements, this meeting was the only possibility for students to pose their questions.
On May 22, all Logic students received another email from the Head of Logic fully explaining the new measures for the resit and the remaining logic exam. This email outlined several changes to the exam which will now last three hours. During the first hour and a half, students are monitored through Zoom and have to be able to share their screen whenever asked. During the second hour and a half, all students are required to wait in an online waiting room while around 20 percent of the students will be asked for oral justification of their answers. Additionally, students can also be questioned for an oral examination a few days after the exam if anything out of the ordinary is found in their test results.
Kronevska says that some students are especially unhappy about the unexpected oral examination, as they have to be on call until 9 PM, which is difficult for people in different timezones. She adds “It completely eliminates the opportunity to guess an answer every now and then, which you are allowed to do during a normal exam. It just makes the exam a lot harder than it would be in person.”
Some students are also worried about the sudden extra workload this resit gives them. “On top of having the fourth exam in like a week, we also have to take the merged second and third exam on the 3rd of June,” Sarlej says. This means students have Logic exams covering three quarters of the full course material in the upcoming weeks alongside other final exams.
The Herring 