Exposed: Pharma Faculty in exam scam

Exam questions, along with correct answers, were available to pharmacy students before this summer’s exam. Lazy lecturers or cheating? Students speak out

by Sune Engel Rasmussen, English version by Luci Ellis

For students taking the course 'Organ Related Pharmacology', some of the questions in their summer exams were surprisingly easy.

On two occasions, the questions found in their finals were identical to problems they had already worked on in class. The questions were also freely available, along with the correct answers, on the course website.

Lasse Nørfeldt was a student on the course, which is about how different medicines affect human organs. During the exam, he recognised two of the questions, which he by chance had worked on just the day before.

Took answers into exam room

He had even, quite legally, taken the answers to these very questions with him into the exam and could simply take a look at his notes instead of working out the answer.

For those students who didn’t pass the exam first time around, the retakes in August were even easier.

Here, an astounding 25 pct of the total exam was an exact copy of a trial exam available on the faculty website.

»I was not lucky enough to recognise the partial question that was reproduced in the June exam, but at the re-sit I discovered that all of the final question was a direct copy from a trial paper I had worked on a few days previously, and which I had with me in the exam room. So I could just copy it directly onto my exam paper,« explains a female student who wishes to remain anonymous. The editor is aware of her identity.

»I was really surprised, but it did give me more time to work on the other problems, which were really tough,« she says.

A matter of life and death

Lasse Nørfeldt doesn’t mind us publishing his name. He was disturbed by his own experience and he was disgusted when he heard about the re-sit.

He feels that it makes his subject look bad and could have serious consequences for society.

»Organ related pharmacology is the most important subject in our discipline. It is what makes us pharnmacists,« he explains.

»Such sloppiness is harmful for current and prospective students. It could even be a matter of life and death if we are not properly educated,« he says.

Not a coincidence

Lasse Nørfeldt is unsure of how such an overlap could occur, but speculates, »It is either a case of lazy lecturers, who are trying to help the students through the exam because they know the teaching is substandard, or an underhand attempt to raise the percentage of students who pass.«

He does not believe the overlap is a coincidence, since it happened twice.

The female student who took the re-sit exam does not feel that the standards are too low. But she does feel that the faculty helps the weakest students.

No excuse for lower standards

»The level is high, but the faculty does a lot to help us pass exams, and I think that is positive. But of course it is not okay to reuse a whole question from a previous paper,« she says.

The Pharmaceutical Sciences have a huge syllabus and, according to Lasse, this demands a lot of students. But in his opinion, this is no excuse for lowering standards.

Pharmacists are in demand, and their education is expensive. One motive for attempting to ensure that more students pass the exams could be to gain more of the so-called ‘Taxi-meter’ money, which is the government grant given to faculties based on pass-rates.

ser@adm.ku.dk

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