Dentistry Today: New Cheating Scheme Rocks New Jersey Dental School

The Star-Ledger: New cheating scheme rocks dental school

A new cheating scandal has hit the state’s dental school, this time involving an elaborate scheme by students to secretly memorize test questions and distribute the answers.

At least four students at the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey are facing dismissal and four others could be suspended for the remainder of the year or receive letters of reprimand, a school official said.

t is the second major cheating incident at UMDNJ’s New Jersey Dental School in less than a year. Nearly a quarter of last year’s graduating class was forced to perform up to a year of community service, and one student was denied a diploma, after the students were caught trading credits for clinical procedures they never performed.

Trading credits while NOT performing procedures is definitely something to consider for expulsion from the school/profession.

But copying old exam questions?

Cecile A. Feldman, dean of the dental school in Newark, expressed anger at the new scheme. “It’s clearly not something we accept at this university,” she said. “This is not what we do as professionals.”

The scandal involved the distribution of exam questions to students likely to take the exams the following year.

As many schools do, New Jersey Dental School releases old exams each year to provide students with an idea of the kinds of questions they will face. Those tests are typically distributed to incoming students as study aids. In fact, some schools create a formal archive of old exams for students to study.

However, a number of students at the dental school took the tradition to another level — gaining copies of exams that were still being used and never intended for release.

According to Feldman, the students came up with a clandestine operation to cull questions from the exams. She said they instructed other members of the class to memorize specified questions and set up e-mail accounts under false names so that nothing could be traced back to them. The questions would be e-mailed to other students for posting on a Web site, and the composite exams would be handed over as a gift to the next year’s class.

If the dental school Professors want to ban the use of previous tests, Flap suggests they take the time and write new examinations each year, instead of being lazy asses.

The school should open up the examination process and post all of the exams with answer keys on the library website. Every student, then, would have equal access to the material.

As for the professors, how about requiring the students to write essays for their examinations instead of asking the same ol’ multiple choice questions that can be scan graded? Oh yeah, it might require some time to grade them.

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