Is it unethical of me and can I get in trouble if a professor passes me based on an oral exam without attending class?

Question

I have been experiencing anxiety based on some recent events. During my last semester of college I enrolled in a language course in a language in which I was already fluent. I did this to enable quicker graduation.

After the first two weeks of the class, it became apparent I wasn't going to benefit at all from this course. Additionally, as I was soon graduating, I had other work to perform. I asked the professor if I could stop attending classes and simply turn in the homework by the end of the semester. I did this while speaking the language that she taught. She said "yes".

I didn't attend class for a month and a half, and didn't hear from the professor again. Towards the end of the semester, I emailed the professor to inquire what she wanted me to do to pass the course. She scolded me because she wanted me to attend at least some of the classes (I had misunderstood her in our first conversation). She then told me that despite that, it was OK, she would give me a passing grade (via oral exam), as "you are fluent in the language and shouldn't come to class as it will seem unfair to the other kids."

This appeared to me as if she would pass me based on merit alone. I was VERY shook up, and called her again the same week telling her that I feel like withdrawing and holding off graduation and just taking a different course next semester before starting grad school. She reassured me I'm all set and I need not worry.

Graduation happens, however I was still uneasy as I was preparing to start grad school. I felt like I cheated the system. I contacted her again, and again she told me not to worry. After the first week of grad shool, I called her again and demanded I take the midterm and final for the course in an attempt to ease my mind and worry. Scored 99 and 96 on them without studying.

I still feel really guilty for some reason, and I'm still trying to cope with this. Its honestly affecting my performance in school. MY worse nightmare is that my undergrad will find out and take away my degree and that this will affect my grad school as I needed a bachelors to enter. The professor made it seem as if she was taking a risk by letting me do what I did. She made it seem I was doing something illegal. She told me not to tell my classmates..

As such, my question is: If what happened was found out, would my grad school have grounds to kick me out? If my undergrad found out, can they pull me degree?

Edit: Thanks for the answers, I guess why I'm soo stressed about this is because, to my understanding, she made it obvious that I and the prof. were doing something against school policies, I knew about it and didn't think much about it.

Answer 1

I feel like you're overthinking this. What you did seems an improvement to me over taking, say, bowling to fill a last credit, which isn't uncommon in undergrad. The professor gave you your grade and you're off to grad school. There's no reason to revisit it, with yourself or anyone else.

Also, it isn't your responsibility, as a student, to audit how a professor grades a class. They may have even consulted with others before letting you do this; you don't know. Don't make assumptions - you did what you did, and the professor decided it was enough to pass the class.

Put this behind you and focus on grad school.

Answer 2

Many schools, including the one where I got my undergraduate degree, have a system whereby a student can get credit for a course by proving that he knows the material --- usually by taking exams but possibly by other means. There's usually a limit on how may credits one can get this way. Even if your school doesn't have such a system, the availability of the system in other, reputable schools indicates that there's nothing morally wrong with getting credit in this way. So you should have no worries about the morality of your situation.

You are also worried about the administrative situation, specifically that you could get expelled from graduate school if your undergraduate degree is revoked and that this might happen if that one credit is deleted from your record. As far as I can see, your professor acted within the limits of her authority in passing you on the basis of talking with you enough to determine that you know the material of the course (and more). Her actions are supported even more by your later performance on the exams. And she had a legitimate interest in preventing you from participating in the class because your superior knowledge would intimidate other students and possibly decrease their learning. So it's difficult for me to imagine anything in this situation that would cause administrative problems, such as removing that credit from your record.

Answer 3

I can assure you, that there will never be any consequences from this, that's for certain. You asked the professor - she allowed it. It's her problem, not yours. You won't ever lose this degree, because you did something totally legal.

In terms of morality: Those grades are - in the end - not made for universities, but rather for companies to have a rating of your competence. And you ARE competent in this language. I think there is no moral problem at all. You have a degree in something you really know. That's only fair.

Answer 4

The question is: is it a cheat and who is being cheated?

Instead of giving a straight answer, I give you a recipe to analyse the situation and test your view of the situation:

True story: As a TA, I had a guy in class who didn't work during class, and probably not even at home. Just chatted with me all the time (which was fine, everybody else was working, but that was not a problem with me). Very smart guy. Anyway, end of semester, they have to submit, he sat down for a weekend, did the task everyone else worked for a semester on and ended up with the by far strongest submission. Should I have failed him?

Ok, let's change the scenario to a hypothetical one, as you already were fluent in the language before the course: assuming this guy had thought about the same problem at school, before coming to my course. He already had a solution in his head, and joined the course, and could use the solution out of his head. Lucky guy. Should I have failed him?

Now, final hypothetical change: this guy comes to my course just because he knows that I am covering just the problem he knows how to solve. And that's where the dilemma begins. He chose the course for that very reason. In other words, he would not have demonstrated improvement during the course, only that he already masters the contents. Should I fail him for fulfilling the requirements of the course better than anybody else? Well, the question is: is the passing for improvement during the course or for final level of mastery?

The opposite question: A very weak student who improves significantly, but still not really to passing level, should they pass? Normally, standard is that students have to pass at a fixed competence level - and improvement is not typically what is measured during the course. Thus, the student will fail. Improvement is not what is measured.

Your dilemma is that typically courses are chosen for improvement and then demonstrating a certain level at the end (implying that the improvement was successful). In your special case, you know that there was no improvement, all you showed is that you do have a certain competence (which is all that an exam tests).

You seem to feel that you violated not the letter, but the spirit of taking the course. But, at the end of the day, you didn't cheat about your competency, which is all that the grades guarantee, and actually is what taking this course promises to anybody passing it.

So, who is actually being cheated here? The person you cheated is actually nobody else but yourself: after all, academia is about learning - instead of taking the course as an opportunity to develop yourself, you took the easier route and missed an opportunity to develop skills you didn't have to a nice competence level, and rather rehashed skills you already have, to an irrelevant level.

The one that needs to forgive here is therefore yourself: you essentially cheated yourself out of an opportunity, which you wasted. But I think you learnt a lesson. Other opportunities to learn will offer themselves.

Take this message home: Pack this up as a valuable experience and approach your future challenges with eagerness to learn rather than just passing exams. Good luck!

Answer 5

This is an edited version of my original answer to one of your deleted questions.

Juan, you have written about a feeling of panic, which doesn't subside. Panic is a metabolic process. Take it to the doctor. Model the behavior you will want your future patients to exhibit. Please see a doctor.

Seeking treatment for panic is not easy, but neither is living with panic. I know because my son has Tourette Syndrome, OCD, specific phobias, and anxiety. I have seen how panic affects him.

He's been in treatment for a year and a half and is making progress.

Someday you will be a doctor. Wouldn't Dr. Alvez send young Juan to see a doctor about this panic? Show your respect for the profession you want to enter, by allowing a medical provider to start to help you.

A family practitioner, or a student clinic doctor or nurse practitioner, can talk over your options with you. Just print out the question you posted here, and show it to the doctor.

Answer 6

Let me add a very plain and straightforward answer:

It's fine.

Yes, what you did is morally acceptable. Some aspects:

Effort

Grades are and should be given for results achieved, not for the amount of effort invested or relative improvement. Plain and simple.

The people reading your grades later are not interested in the least about how much effort you invested. They are interested in whether you can speak that language or not. So you are not cheating them.

Fairness

Your co-students might be irritated that you got the mark without effort, but ... frankly, it is very normal that different students have to invest different effort in a course. Heck, there are also cases where one student hates a course and has to put in 20 hours of work just to barely pass; and another student loves the course and has to put in 0 hours of extra work. Is this "immoral" as well? No, of course not. What good would it do your co-student if you just sat in class, dreaming, wasting everybodies time. So you did not cheat them either. Neither did you cheat your professor, as you were very open with them.

If you really had cheated, for example by having a native speaker do a written test and writing your name on it, then you would have harmed your co-students by lessening the validity of the grade in and itself (e.g., if word came out that this is a common occurence in this particular school, everybody with a real grade would be under suspicion, devaluating the school itself).

Are you allowed to enjoy your education?

Finally, it is not only usual, but also just fine that every student choses a path through his studies that fits his own interests, enjoyments etc. - it is obvious that a student who does what he enjoys (or already can do, maybe partly or on a hobby level) will get better results, statistically. Not only better marks, but also better understanding etc. Doing things you enjoy will usually make it easier for you, and this is fine. School/education does not get better if it is artificially made harder.

This does not mean that students should "game the system", but that school/education systems should be structured in a way which allows people to live out their interests and predispositions. Of course, a common base set of knowledge is necessary, but this is easily achieved structurally by having courses being compulsary. The grading system makes sure that people are not just fooling around.

So, having fun during your education does not cheat anyone, either.

Drawback

You did do yourself a slight disfavour. A "mirror student" who already knew that language as well as you did, and got all the same marks as you, could have picked a real course for that last point (maybe in addition to your language course, if that is allowed in your school system). That student would have the exact same end result as you, plus some additional bonus. An employer would, everything else being the same, hire the other guy instead of you.

This alone easily balances out the fact that you filled up your grades with an easy 1-point course. You did not cheat; you weighed your options and decided on a permitted course, being open about it to your professor. All is well.

So, at the most, you cheated yourself a little bit. But you made up by doing other worthwhile stuff, you presumably did not waste the time you saved by not going to that course.

Answer 7

It's worth pointing out that this depends on your philosophy about what a transcript is. Clearly in some sense the transcript holds merits that you have achieved but there's leeway in how you interpret that, mostly in terms of whether you're looking for something which is normatively true ("here's how it should be") or whether you're looking for something which is descriptively true ("here's how it is in practice").

The most normative model

Your anxiety aside, you might be holding yourself the the highest ethical standards simply for the sake of your own moral foundations, and then you might want to know what a transcript should be. If you look at, say, ECTS credits (European) you'll find that they define those credits as time investment. This is a really sensible choice for how you "should" define such things as it creates a meaningful way to compare across wildly different scopes like different majors: I can't say whether architecture is harder than applied physics; but I can certainly add up all of the long nights that both are spending doing their respective works and simply compare time-investments in both majors.

If your transcript is a record of time invested in achievements then the answer is a straightforward "yes, you are now lying when you hand your transcript to someone and don't disclose that you didn't work very hard to achieve this merit." But on the other hand you have to be shocked a little by how crude the transcript is as a measurement of such things: the assumptions that "grade" and "credit hours" correlate with "time spent" is weak in practice, and there is no good provision in this normative system for "person X did well without effort, person Y did the same tasks but struggled for a long time:" you have to just normalize the credits to the average person in the class. So this is normatively stronger but descriptively weak.

The most descriptive model

This is really straightforward; a transcript is a record of bits that have been set in a database which are somehow important for the bookkeepers at the school to know that you're graduating. Any correspondence between the bits and the real world is an approximation due to the school and any failure in that correspondence is their fault. You got the credits in the system? Great. Doesn't matter how you did; that's a problem for the school, not you.

The obvious limitation is that on this model of what transcripts are, there's no moral implications to any sort of cheating at all, because cheating from this perspective is just exploiting ways that the credit-system doesn't match up to the reality intended by the school. But on this view it's the school's responsibility to secure themselves against that; in practice everyone will know the difference between the higher-reputation schools that are robust against this and the "they basically just mail you a diploma" schools that are not. What you did wasn't defined at the time as cheating by your school, so it's not cheating, period. You yourself said that they had no policy on it.

Something in the middle

Well you might not like either of those: you might not like how the super-normative model doesn't account for practical things like individual differences but you might not like how the super-descriptive model doesn't account for the moral import of cheating and lying that you somehow have achieved X when you haven't really put any time or effort into that achievement. Here's a model which lives in the middle and gets a lot of the best of both worlds. It says: your transcript is a record of skills you at some point had, with grades being competencies at-the-time and credit hours being roughly how much practice you had performing that skill at-the-time.

Now this suggests that probably transcripts are poorly suited to what they measure, because probably we should break down courses even smaller and have a lot of Proven-Competent/Not-Yet-Proven-Competent gradings. Different courses would then prove a set of skills competent, and you would be expected to take a set of courses which jointly cover some set of Required skills as well as covering some set of Optional skills. So it inherits some of those normative difficulties of "nobody actually does this 100%, the transcript is a crude approximation." But, I mean, it works if you imagine that all of those sets-of-skills are disjoint and don't look too closely at course prerequisites.

But overall it is pretty practical from a "here is what an employer is interested in if they request your transcript" perspective; if you go to work for Intel and they look at your transcript they want to see a Solid-State Physics course that presumably covered things like how NPN and PNP transistors work, as well as Electronics courses that covered things like "practically, what is an op-amp?".

Now if you take this approach, then clearly you didn't cheat the system. Your transcript reflects a skill which you did in fact have; you just got certified as competent in it without spending much time because you had already invested that time before you walked in the door, prior to the school year. That's no big moral dilemma; the same thing happens whenever people with great AP scores "test out" of certain required courses and so forth.

Answer 8

So many good answers, but one angle still not covered.

When I went to college, there was always the test out/challenge option available. At the start of the class you could take the final. If you passed you got a grade of CR (credit -- pass with no effect on GPA) and that was that.

I recall some case where somebody challenged a course about two-thirds of the way through (something came up and he couldn't finish...) so the rule appears to not be restricted to start of the course.

I can't imagine anybody looking down on what happened here as you obviously could have passed a challenge, and the instructor may have recorded it as such.

Answer 9

I was very ill for one semester's exams, and was given an oral exam for one subject. The professor (who was by no stretch of the imagination one to short-cut the system, and was reputed to have obtained his doctorate on the basis of a one-page thesis) explained that originally ALL examinations were oral and it allows the examiners to assess whether they need to extend the inquisition to determine whether the candidate is competent or whether the candidate has an acceptable knowledge of the subject matter.

Naturally, as the number of students grew, this system became incongruous and written examinations became the accepted method. With the rise of the universal doctrine of "fair", a written exam also ensures (at least in theory) that the same assessment criteria are applied to each candidate.

Answer 10

The only thing that really matters is this: do you have a mastery of the subject you studied? The grade you get, and the degree you are awarded, should only be a documentation of this mastery. The purpose of an exam or a paper is to demonstrate your mastery of the subject. The grade is just a way of keeping score and communicating your master to people outside the field.

In light of that perspective, I would argue it's entirely ethical to be awarded a grade based on a personalized study and testing plan with the professor. As long as you are able to demonstrate your mastery of the subject matter somehow, you legitimately earned the grade, even if you didn't demonstrate that mastery the same way the other students did. The objective of college is gaining the knowledge, not getting a grade or a diploma. If the professor judged that you had an adequate mastery of the subject to award you the grade on the basis of an oral exam, that is his prerogative. Legally speaking, that is defensible as a reasonable accommodation for a disability under the ADA.

Bottom line:

If you cheat your way to graduation with a 4.0 GPA but don't master the subject matter, you might be able to get hired but you'll quickly be fired for incompetence. As a hiring manager I have to screen out these "paper tigers". I can't tell you how many people I've interviewed who had master's degrees but couldn't perform the most basic skills in their career field.

If you don't have a degree but do have a mastery of the subject matter, it might be harder for you to get your first job, but you'll keep it and advance because you're competent. After your first job, it's your work history that matters much more than your degree, except in licensed professions like law or medicine which have a degree as a prerequisite for licensing. (And even then it's not cast in stone: for instance in Virginia and some other states you can sit for the Bar exam and be admitted to the bar without a law degree if you study law under an attorney or judge)