May 9, 2007 -- A Columbia University professor is in hot water for leaking the contents of a compulsory literature exam to her students, allowing hundreds of Ivy League freshmen to cheat on their final and get away with it, campus sources said yesterday.

The professor - identified by students as Wen Jin - told dozens of students in her Literature Humanities section which passages from the books they'd studied throughout the year would be included in last Friday's exam, members of the class told The Post.

The information instantly spread across the campus when "study guides" containing the teacher's sneak peak at the exam topics were e-mailed and left in dorms, cafés and at a football game, students said.

"It spread like wildfire," said 18-year-old Jessica Nevitt, who knew about the "guide," but decided to take the test without using it.

"I think it was the professor's fault, giving out that information. It's pretty ridiculous, especially for a school like this."

Columbia yesterday decided not to punish any of the cheating students.

A committee of senior faculty who teach Literature Humanities - the portion of Columbia College's "core curriculum" which freshmen are required to take - decided students were not to blame.

"The committee met today and confirmed that the exam had been compromised and that responsibility for this lay with an individual faculty member and not with the students," Dean of Columbia College Austin Quigley said in a statement.

Quigley said students in the course would be given two options - either have their grade for the year determined by coursework, or take a replacement exam.

The committee had not yet made a decision as to whether to discipline the teacher, who works in the English and Comparative Literature Department. Reached at her home yesterday, the tenure-track associate professor declined to comment.

The cheating was discovered when the faculty decided at the last minute to change one of the excerpts - a quotation from Fyodor Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment."

Students who read the study guide were informed that the exam would quiz them on a passage from the epilogue of the book.

In fact, the epilogue was not used on the exam. Rather, the final included a passage from Part IV, Chapter I, when Arkady Ivanovitch Svidrigailov ponders whether eternity is like being locked in a room filled with spiders.

Literature Humanities teachers were sent an e-mail yesterday pointing out the "tell-tale signs" that students had cheated.

In the e-mail, which was leaked to a popular Columbia blog called Bwog.net, Associate Dean of the Core Curriculum Deborah Martinsen said students did not know about the last-minute substitution.

"So, if any of your students identified the passage from 'Crime and Punishment' as occurring in the epilogue, chances are they had access to these notes," Martinsen wrote.

"If the student correctly identified all of the other passages, chances are even greater. If they identified the exact Canto in Dante, they are very high indeed."

Susanna Wolff, 19, admitted she had seen the "study guide" before the exam, but she knew the passage from "Crime and Punishment" wasn't from the epilogue.

"A lot of people figured out that it wasn't from the epilogue, but just had no idea where it was from," she said. "Other people just blindly put down 'epilogue.' "

tatiana.deligiannakis@nypost.com

Students enrolled in Literature Humanities will be required retake the final exam or drop the test from their semester grades, Columbia College administrators announced Tuesday after the contents of the final were leaked by an instructor and circulated widely in advance of the test.

The statement followed a determination by an ad hoc senior faculty committee—appointed Monday to investigate the early disclosure—that the results of Friday's final should be discarded, as "the exam had been compromised and ... responsibility for this [the leak] lay with an individual faculty member and not with the students."

Students enrolled in the class—a yearlong survey of Western literature required under the Core Curriculum—will be allowed to base their semester grades off of coursework evaluated prior to the exam or, if they choose, to take a second version of test in the fall. Grades for the course excluding the final exam are to be posted by May 15. Students will have until May 18 to opt into the replacement test.

The ad hoc committee was comprised of three former Literature Humanities chairs, current chair Patricia Grieve, Dean of Columbia College Austin Quigley, next year's chair, Gareth Williams, and two other senior faculty members who are teaching literature humanities.

Bwog, the blog of campus magazine The Blue and White, first reported on Sunday that the details of the exam had been leaked to one section of the course and spread extensively to other students in the form of a review sheet. The page included information about quote identifications, excerpts, and possible essay questions from the test.

Kathryn Yatrakis, dean of academic affairs, said that the faculty member responsible came forward after the leak was reported to the Office of the Core Curriculum on Monday.

"I think the most charitable word would be puzzlement, just absolute bafflement," Yatrakis said of the professor's decision. She added that it was not clear whether disciplinary action would be taken against the instructor.

Yatrakis declined to name the professor responsible, but a student from the affected section—who requested anonymity due to the sensitivity of the subject—identified her as Wen Jin, a junior professor who also teaches Asian American Literature and Culture. Jin did not return a request for comment.

The student added that she was unaware at the time that the review sheet her professor had prepared qualified as illegitimate help. "I didn't think it was that big of a deal. In high school, that used to happen, [and] teachers would be like, 'You should study this one chapter,'" she said.

"That sucks bigtime," Lakshika Trikha, CC '10, said of the decision to toss the exam results. "No one I know knew about it [the review sheets] before the exam."

Grieve called an incident like this "unprecedented", but Sam Stampfer, CC '07, said that his father had caught wind of—and staved off—something similar thirty years earlier at Columbia.

According to Stampfer, Meir Stampfer, CC '73, was a sophomore preparing for his Contemporary Civilizations final, when he chanced on a review sheet making its way around hundreds of students in the course. A professor who reportedly had a rocky relationship with the University's administration had given out information about the exact content of the exam.

Stampfer said his father then went to the Dean with the review sheet. As a result, the final was changed entirely overnight. "It screwed over students who weren't prepared to take the CC final," he said.

Jacob Schneider contributed to this article.

哥伦比亚大学的一名年轻华人助理教授日前被怀疑帮助学生在考试中作弊而遭到校方调查，9日更是成了一些英文媒体炒作的焦点。

2000年从上海复旦大学本科毕业的金雯(Wen Jin，音译)于去年从西北大学获得文学博士学位，之后在哥伦比亚大学担任文学系助理教授。

她在上周五哥大本科生部一年级的文学基础课期末考试前因为向某个班的学生指出试卷中会包括的某些教科书中的章节而被指帮助学生作弊。

据哥大校方发布的资料以及《纽约邮报》的报道称，在上周五哥大本科生部的基础文学课的期末考试前，几十名学生事先得到一份考试“指南”并通过电子邮件和纸头复印将其四处传播开来。

据称该指南是这门课的老师金雯在考试前向某一个班的学生透露的，这份资料标明了课本中的哪些段落会出现在期末考试的试卷中，考试时学生们需要将某些文学段落同旁边列出的某些书的章节进行匹配。

但 出题的老师在最后一刻将其中的一道题目做了变动，即将其中引用的俄国文学家陀斯妥耶夫斯基(Fyodor Dostoevsky)的作品《罪与罚》的两个片断进行了替换。一些得到那份考试“指南”的学生因为不知道这一变化，因此还是按“原计划”答题，指出这一 段落是出自该书的结尾，但实际该段落却是出自该书的第一章的某一段。

一些改考卷的老师因为在事后发现许多学生居然犯同样的错误而怀疑有作弊行为，之后负责基础课教学的负责人也收到举报邮件。

校 方在昨天向全体学生发表的一份声明中称，经过调查，以上科目的考试的确遭人泄漏题目，但责任不在学生，而是在某位教学人员。学生们将有两种选择，要么要求 重考，要么选择让老师根据平时成绩计算期末成绩。据哥大本科生院的院长Austin Quigley在声明中表示，目前他们还没有决定是否要处罚这名老师。

金雯本人在此期间拒绝回答媒体的询问。

许多学生在网站上纷纷发表评论称，学生当然不应该负任何责任，因为是他们的老师告诉他们有关考试的内容，难道老师这么说他们还能去主动举报不成。

而另有学生则认为，这门课的考试都是一些选择题，本来也不难，但现在一些原本可以靠真本事得A的学生却无故受到牵连，成绩也被作废，因此对他们不公平，尤其是一些人早已经跑去度假了，谁还会愿意再跑回来重新考试。

Q: One of the instructors of a required freshman seminar gives out the exact content of the coursewide final exam in advance. A "study guide" rapidly spreads to hundreds of students, who use it to ace the exam -- except for the one question subbed out at the last minute. This is:

A) Cheating

B) Cheating

C) Cheating

D) Cheating

E) Not Cheating

Welcome to Columbia University, where students are circling (E). Or they are on Bwog, at least, where we should admit upfront we're getting 90 percent of our information on this four-alarm Ivy cheating scandal. (Spec has some more details and confirmations here.) Let's back up and let Dr. Deborah Martinsen, a dean of the Core Curriculum, explain:

There has been an unfortunate breach in Lit Hum final exam security.

Notes identifying the quotations and sketching out the essay questions circulated among students prior to the exam. (We have one copy of these notes.)

THE TELL-TALE SIGN: Crime and Punishment - the students did not know of the last-minute quotation substitution.

SO, if any of your students identified the passage from Crime and Punishment as occuring in the Epilogue, chances are they had access to these notes. If the student correctly identified all of the other passages, chances are even greater. If they identified the exact Canto in Dante, they are very high indeed.

... WE WILL REQUIRE THAT ALL INSTRUCTORS SUBMIT ALL BLUE BOOKS TO THE CORE OFFICE.

It is, to quote another email from department chair Patricia Grieve, a "complicated situation." Namely, the situation that hundreds of students may have cheated on the single-most important exam at Columbia College. But in the raging id of the Bwog comments section, the few students pointing that out are being shouted down by students who blame the professor, Martinsen, the course itself -- basically, anyone and anything but themselves.

Posted by sophomore: I think it's more wrong of the professor to put her students in such a situation: on one hand, they might have realized (but we can't be sure of that) that they had an unfair advantage, but on the other hand, what were they supposed to do? Speak up and get their teacher in trouble right before a final?

Martinsen, get your fucking act together. Blame the PROF not the students. Understand the precedent you're setting here. If you put the blame on the students and not on the professor, you have created a system where the teachers can now "trick" students into cheating.

Posted by obviously: just to get it straight, i don't view any of this as cheating on behalf of the students.Posted by fy who never saw it: NO WAY. NONE OF THIS IS CHEATING.

Posted by lit hum bullshit: this is such bullshit. just because some teacher is incompetent and gives out the answers doesn't mean that the rest of us should suffer.

That's selective, of course, but go read the desperate screeds (there are a few particularly nasty ones) and see if you come up with a different take. In closing, we'll turn the mike over to one last commenter.

Posted by word: For those of you who want to deny it, let me clarify for you: IT WAS CHEATING.