Post Your Exam: A Good Service, but is it Ethical?

BY JAIDAA TAHA
@Judytaha9

Post Your Exam, an online student assistance website, recently allowed AUCians and faculty access to view past exams.

The idea is appealing to AUC students, particularly during midterms.

“When we launched [at] AUC, we got more online visitors in a few days than we previously had in one month,” said Kariem Nagi, a student at Technische Universitat Dortmund in Germany and one of the website’s founders.

Launched online in September 2015 by five university students, the website aims to provide information to students and parents about the different schools and universities in Cairo.

Post Your Exam allows users to also browse exam formats, reviews and ratings.

“It wasn’t planned, the idea was very random,” Nagi, 20, says of the website.

He said that they started the project with German schools by coincidence but that the project soon expanded.

The website has gotten considerable support among students and faculty.

Associate Professor of Marketing Ibrahim Hegazy told The Caravan that he supports Post Your Exam because it would ease the pressure of studying and force professors to routinely change the content of their exams.

Hegazy said that he stopped depending on test banks for his exams after he realized that all his students were suddenly ‘acing’ them.

When he rewrote the exams, the results radically changed.

Nagi explained that the website was not trying to help students cheat or deceive their professors, because exams aren’t usually handed out twice.

“It’s not cheating, we don’t steal these exams. The exams are already there for students, and if a professor asked to remove it, we would,” Nagi said, adding that a lawyer was consulted for legal issues.

Adjunct journalism professor Khaled Dawoud believes that the website is a useful tool for exchanging information but that reviewing past exams will not guarantee students an A.

Dawoud also said that the website should not be regarded as unethical because professors are expected to change their exams every semester; similarly, in the Egyptian Thanweyya Amma, students solve past exam samples in the books in order to be well-prepared he added.

“The second I hand over an exam, it’s no longer a secret document,” said Dawoud.

Hegazy also does not see the services provided by Post Your Exam as violations of academic integrity.

“[We’re talking about] a published copy of the exam, they are not stealing my own questions that they did not know about,” Hegazy said.

But Academic Integrity Committee member Michelle Henry cautioned that an exam posted on the website without the professor’s consent should be considered a violation.

“For this database, we don’t know if the student [had] been authorized to have the exam to distribute as practice or if they had taken them from the exam room without permission,” Henry said.

Nagi admits that the website still needs to collaborate with the university to determine whether or not professors want their exams online.

Hegazy and Dawoud have opposing views on the matter when asked if they would want
their exams posted on the website.

Hegazy said he would not post his exams on the web because he did not want students to assume that the online version was the only format.

Dawoud, on the other hand, said that he would post his exams to provide students a
glimpse of the type of written exams they would have take.

Computer engineering sophomore Shady Shendy believes it is his role to share his experience with all other students.

“And it’s the professor’s role to regenerate the exams,” he added.

Post Your Exam’s motto is ‘study smarter not harder’. Dawoud said that being smart is good, but it is not wise to overlook the material and depend entirely on past exams.

“Students should care more about gaining knowledge and go with the motto: study and enjoy studying,” Dawoud told The Caravan.