So mainstream media picked up this story, after it was first reported on insideparadeplatz.
https://www.derbund.ch/wirtschaftspruefer-beim-abschlusstest-geschummelt-job-verloren-559120588563
First it sounded like students figured out how to access the solutions to an online exam by "hacking". Then insideparadeplatz reported that the link to access the solutions was actually openly displayed to the students:
https://insideparadeplatz.ch/2024/09/24/revisoren-bschiss-bis-200-jung-stars-sanktioniert
With 200 young people affected and dozens losing their job, I figured someone in r/switzerland is affected by this.
Expertsuisse exam cheating scandal – Any insight into what exactly happened?
byu/onehandedbackhand inSwitzerland
Posted by onehandedbackhand
3 Comments
Looks like the Expertsuisse employees are commenting from their high horses. I would expect some responsible people there to be fired too. After all, if 200 students manage to do it, you can’t credibly call it “hacking the system”.
Sometimes people are so stupid about making web exams. I had an exam once where after the first attempt it was supposed to tell you the overall score how many questions you had correct, but not which ones exactly. But if you inspected the page, there was a hidden div which had no text content, but had CSS values that told you which question was wrong. And this exam was from an antivirus manufacturer…
The error these students seem to have made is that their method of cheating involved an additional HTTPS query which they submitted under their own user account so it was logged.
If we can believe the “Inside Paradeplatz” article, absolutely no cheating happened.
Some of the students (or rather: examinees) simply clicked on a link where they could see the results of their own exam *after* they had handed in that exam.
So the “problem” here seems not to be about cheating, the problem seems to be that ExpertSuisse wants to avoid transparentcy in their exams. Apparently their modus operandi has been so far that they don’t tell the students which of their answers were correct and which weren’t.
Inside Paradeplatz speculates that this is because they’ve always been using the same questions for years and would now have to come up with new ones if the questions & results from prior exams become public.
People in the comments speculate that it’s even worse: apparently there is a limited number of students who are “allowed” to pass. So if you’re in a “good” year, you have to do better in the exam compared to a “bad” year. Obviously an organization who pulls such shenannigans without being really transparent about it also doesn’t want that the students know many of the questions they got right and how many they didn’t.