“Anonymity is appreciated”

.....From this morning’s Inside Higher Ed: Finished With Your Exam? Good. Now Share It.:

.....Friday was the last day of classes at the University of California at San Diego, where students faced a weekend of studying before finals began on Monday. If any of them ventured to a nearby La Jolla shopping center, they might have encountered representatives from a new Web site there to make their pitch: Give us a test — any old test — and we’ll give you a $5 Starbucks coffee card.
.....If that sounds like a surprisingly blunt quid pro quo, it’s consistent with the purpose of the site, called PostYourTest.com, which encourages students to upload tests and exams from their courses — anonymously, if they want — for others to find and download. The concept has already aroused suspicion and concern among some faculty members at UCSD, where many of the posted tests originated, and seems to run afoul of both traditionally accepted norms of academic integrity and, potentially, copyright law.
.....The PostYourTest event on Friday, at which students could electronically scan old tests for a coffee card on the spot, is part of a campaign to raise awareness and collect materials for the site. Its creator, Demir Oral, is from San Diego and is initially focusing his efforts there. Among the 500 or so exams currently available (by Oral’s reckoning), those not from UCSD are mainly from other institutions in the area, such as Palomar Community College.
.....“I’m sure I will get a lot of questions about the morality of PostYourTest.com,” Oral writes on the site. “I want people to understand that this website is not a tool for cheating, and I do not advocate cheating in any way. However I know that in this time anonymity is appreciated, and I am always thinking a step ahead, so to create and download tests you do not have to have a user account.”….

.....Also in Inside Higher Ed:

.....The Spellings Commission lives, in a way: The U.S. Education Department is planning a summit in Chicago on July 17-18 to which it has invited many members of the secretary of education’s panel on higher education and other college leaders. Details about the meeting are few at this time. Some people familiar with early planning for the meeting have described it as an effort to assess how the panel’s recommendations have been implemented so far, but others who have spoken to department officials said they have been contemplating one last bold effort to prod change in higher education.