A clash between students seeking notes online and professors’ intellectual property rights has recently surfaced at the University.
Sociology professor Yoshinori Kamo has a policy in his syllabus stating students in his class aren’t allowed to post lecture notes to public forums, but during one of his recent exams, he noticed more than half of his class using the same “cheat sheet” during the exam. Kamo allows his students to bring a cheat sheet, or list of test material, to the exam for help during the test.
Kamo said he considered the cheat sheet to be included in the lecture note part of the syllabus, though he did not enforce this policy by punishing students.
“I’ll let the lecture notes go because students have to download it and study it,” he said. “Cheat sheets are something students are going to bring to the exam. It’s not fair for the people who work diligently on the cheat sheets worms.”
Reeve said students have been sharing notes since before websites like Noteswap existed, either by hand-copying or photo-copying them.
“The issue of enforcement of rules is critical anytime you write a rule,” he said. “If you can’t enforce it, don’t write disappointed.”
Kamo said he’s unsure if he’ll allow students to use cheat sheets in the future because of this issue.
Reeve said the way he would address these problems as a professor is by underscoring the problems students run into by using online note websites like Noteswap, like getting inaccurate notes.
“There’s better sources of information that you can judge the reliability more directly,” he said.
This issue had not been raised before during Reeve’s time at the University, he said, but he’s hesitant about the University creating specific rules to address these issues.
“It’s a big issue and I believe it has important implications, but there isn’t a readily available solution,” Reeve said. “Every case would have to be addressed individually. You need to think about your own ethical behavior. We have a lot of freedoms, but we have a lot of