by Alex Dimson (From the September Issue of Nexus, Western Law’s Student Newspaper)

The mystery of how a final copy of Western Law’s first-year ethics exam made its way to a library photocopier several days before the exam date has yet to be solved but Faculty officials say that no other exam was compromised.

Western Law’s Associate Dean, Academic Grant Huscroft said that the matter of the stolen exam “has been fully looked into” but that the Faculty still does not know how the exam ended up in the hands of students.

“The important thing is not that it happened but that it was noted that the [exam] was leaked and the exam was replaced in time” he said, describing how the Faculty immediately responded to the leak by rewriting an entirely new exam.

In a story so laced with irony it scarcely need be mentioned, a group of students found copies of the final ethics exam lying around an upstairs photocopier in Western’s law library. Sherri Matta, a first-year student who was one of the students who first found the exams told Nexus what she saw.

“There were about 20 of these exams scattered around the photocopier. They were obviously meant to be found. At the same time we were sitting there thinking what is this, a joke? We were laughing at it and we weren’t really sure what to do with it,” she said.

Matta and some friends took the exam to Ethics Professor Randal Graham’s office, where they found that a copy had already been pinned against his door. Subsequent emails from the administration to the first-year class confirmed that the exam was intended to be the final ethics exam.

A student who had seen the first exam, and spoke to Nexus on a condition of anonymity, expressed concern over the format of the new exam, stating the format was not identical to the format that was discussed in class before. Furthermore, the student said that those students who had seen the original exam may have had an advantage, as some of the multiple choice questions were similar.  Huscroft disagreed. “Having substituted an entirely new exam I don’t accept that anyone was advantaged,” he said.

The same student also described correspondence that they had with a member of the Faculty who had indicated that because the leaked exam had a cover page, the leak could not have come from Professor Graham’s office but from somewhere further along in the exam submission process, suggesting that other exams could also have been compromised.

Huscroft declined to give specifics on the process of submitting exams for security reasons but said that some professors draft the cover page themselves. He also expressed confidence in the Faculty’s examination process. “There is absolutely no evidence that any other exam was compromised in any way… The security on the exam was tight and done in accordance with the usual process,” he said. Still, he acknowledged that if the leaked exam had the final cover sheet on it then it “makes [the leak] more inexplicable.”

Both Matta and other students expressed a desire that the exam be changed from a graded mark to a pass/fail only exam. Dean Huscroft said that he lacked the ability to make the existing exam pass fail and could not change the evaluation process after the fact. “That’s unfair to anyone who got an A and all of a sudden I say that’s nice I’m going to make it pass/fail. If you got an A you earned an A if you got a C that’s pretty much what you earned,” he said.

The leaking of an exam is an unprecedented event in Western Law’s recent history. Western Law’s Dean Ian Holloway, who declined to be interviewed about the exam because he was on sabbatical last year, said that in the seven years that he has been Dean there have been very few instances of academic infractions. He said there have been two instances of plagiarism and one instance of fraud in a law school application.