I am enrolled in an upper level STEM class.
My teacher has recently announced that we have a "downloadable" midterm. The midterm is not officially timed, and we have a week to submit it, and there is no way the teacher can track how much time we have used. Now, in class and in a clarification request, it was stated that we have a total time to "work on it" for 3 hours tops, even though we can "look at it" for longer.
I have no clue how to deal with this. A good number of my (normally obsessive/honor code) friends have already told me that they will use more time than what is officially allowed to work on the exam. Based on the sample I've conducted with the people in my year in the class, I would say its highly likely at least 50% are planning on using more time than allowed.
Ngl [not going to lie], I've had to deal with "other people using more than they should be" for at least two of my classes (all of which are online) this semester and I don't want to deal with it in a third. I'm frustrated.
Is there anything I can do?
Solutions I consider:
Students protesting — I don't think anyone is being obsessive about this mess apart from me.
Confronting the teacher myself — for one thing, I'm not sure if I am liked by this person (LOL) but I'm guessing if I say "yo there are students planning on cheating", this person will simply send out an email stating "don't cheat" to the class.
Notes:
The people in the class of my year already know about all this mess of a situation because I discussed the strange rules in our group chat, so I suspect if the professor sends out an email I can be immediately linked as "the person who prompted the kerfuffle". also I'll be known as the rat. I don't care too much about my reputation, but nonetheless this isn't super pleasant. I probably shouldn't have done this, I see now that it is kind of coming back to bite.
Certain details have been changed or obfuscated to avoid identification.
I'm estimating likelihood of cheating based on an informal "poll" I gave in a high-effort group chat; to get a picture of this group, its a bunch of overachieving underclassmen who I don't think would ever cheat in normal circumstances. I have evidence of intention to cheat, I am not willing to submit it to my teacher.
What I would hope from my teacher would be that the "time cap" of 3 hours would be removed; this obviously is going to get violated anyway.
I specifically asked the professor whether we "must not" spend more than 3 hours on the test; he confirmed that 3 hours is a hard limit.
The class is graded on a curve.
What I'm probably gonna do:
I don't think I should contact the professor directly, mostly because I think this person doesn't like me that much. I think my solution is just going to be to email this person anonymously and express that I have concretely seen evidence of people intending to cheat, though I'm not ratting out any fellow students, and I'll request that the time limit is lifted.