I think you're asking the wrong question. If I've read this right, the question you are actually asking is: "Is it ok for an academic to set questions which are not related to the subject they taught?" To which the answer is, it depends how unrelated they are. And the answer would be, if the questions so still relate directly to the syllabus, and the university have given you the syllabus, then that's fair enough. 


What you've learned here is a critical part of university education - it's up to you to make sure that you've learned enough to answer any questions on the syllabus. Engineering courses are often pretty bad at getting this point over (and have been forever). Arts and humanities courses I think tend to be much better at this - at the better universities at least students get the idea pretty quickly that some exam questions could bear little or no relation to the lectures, the student is supposed to have taken those as a starting point and read around the subject. That said, in engineering lectures and tutorials should give you the opportunity to know how to learn the syllabus, and if they don't then it's fair enough to kick up a fuss.


Back to the question you did ask: no, it's not plagiarism to reuse exam materials, it's common sense to do so: it's hard writing good exam questions so it's a waste not to reuse them occasionally. And equally every lecturer will teach the same material a slightly different way, perhaps focusing on their own particular areas of interest.


So (this is the good bit) now you have to take the information you've been given, and absolutely any other information you can find, and use that to solve the problem (the exam question). And that's what engineering is all about!


Sorry this is all sounding a bit Grumpy Old Engineer (and, by the way, I am not a lecturer), but it's really really important - you cannot be trained to be a professional engineer, because every problem you face will be completely different to the last. It's vital that at university you learn to be able to make at least a half decent attempt at solving any problem that's thrown at you in the areas you are studying, even if it hasn't been fully shown to you before.


I do have sympathy, because university grades are important, and you may have learned very much the hard way. Hopefully this happened in your first year. But any grounds for complaint you could have would actually be that it hasn't been explained to you very well how the university learning and assessment process works - unless the questions were definitely off-syllabus.


But at least you know now: keep checking the syllabus, and find every way you can of knowing every detail around each of the subject areas on it. The lecturers will be delighted that one of their students is actually showing an interest in their course!


Good luck,


Andy

I think you're asking the wrong question. If I've read this right, the question you are actually asking is: "Is it ok for an academic to set questions which are not related to the subject they taught?" To which the answer is, it depends how unrelated they are. And the answer would be, if the questions so still relate directly to the syllabus, and the university have given you the syllabus, then that's fair enough. 


What you've learned here is a critical part of university education - it's up to you to make sure that you've learned enough to answer any questions on the syllabus. Engineering courses are often pretty bad at getting this point over (and have been forever). Arts and humanities courses I think tend to be much better at this - at the better universities at least students get the idea pretty quickly that some exam questions could bear little or no relation to the lectures, the student is supposed to have taken those as a starting point and read around the subject. That said, in engineering lectures and tutorials should give you the opportunity to know how to learn the syllabus, and if they don't then it's fair enough to kick up a fuss.


Back to the question you did ask: no, it's not plagiarism to reuse exam materials, it's common sense to do so: it's hard writing good exam questions so it's a waste not to reuse them occasionally. And equally every lecturer will teach the same material a slightly different way, perhaps focusing on their own particular areas of interest.


So (this is the good bit) now you have to take the information you've been given, and absolutely any other information you can find, and use that to solve the problem (the exam question). And that's what engineering is all about!


Sorry this is all sounding a bit Grumpy Old Engineer (and, by the way, I am not a lecturer), but it's really really important - you cannot be trained to be a professional engineer, because every problem you face will be completely different to the last. It's vital that at university you learn to be able to make at least a half decent attempt at solving any problem that's thrown at you in the areas you are studying, even if it hasn't been fully shown to you before.


I do have sympathy, because university grades are important, and you may have learned very much the hard way. Hopefully this happened in your first year. But any grounds for complaint you could have would actually be that it hasn't been explained to you very well how the university learning and assessment process works - unless the questions were definitely off-syllabus.


But at least you know now: keep checking the syllabus, and find every way you can of knowing every detail around each of the subject areas on it. The lecturers will be delighted that one of their students is actually showing an interest in their course!


Good luck,


Andy