Plagarism or inspiration?

I can tell you, ekuseru, that reading through those excerpts and the test prep material side by side made my stomach turn. (And I am not given to histrionics. My gut actually hurt as a result of my reading those posts.) It would be bad enough to see that one high-quality source such as The Atlantic was being poached for articles, but to see that anything available through a Google search was fair game was distressing. Compounding the problem were the clearly deliberate attempts to slightly alter the phrasing of the source material. No case can be made, then, that the person or persons responsible thought the articles might fall under the terms of "fair use," as IanStewart made mention of above. I think I have a rather clear idea of the question creation process at GMAT Whiz, if that is the company you are referring to: find material that others in the industry recommend and rebrand it to sell as part of a proprietary package. I would be curious to see whether the questions to the RC passages were of any account, since those might represent some original thought. (Are the Quant questions just as bad as the plagiarized CR examples from earlier in the thread? You know, instead of 16, the number is changed to 32 or some such, or "Mike" becomes "Ike"?)

Many SC questions come directly from old New York Times articles, and there is no way GMAC™ could dodge licensing fees, since it charges people for access to its products. If you are curious, see the page Obtaining and using Times content for more information. I think question 3 is pertinent to this discussion:

I wanted to touch on one other view that came through since my last post in the thread.

I disagree. As IanStewart and I have argued in this thread and others, such questions have the potential to rob a student of the opportunity to engage with official questions in a realistic manner, to say nothing of legal issues—someone could sue for copyright infringement, and dealing with courts and unscrupulous prep companies can be mentally harmful, to use your word. (You have touched on ethical concerns already.) To be clear, I think it would be fine to use an official question, perhaps one from an edition of the official guide that was no longer in print, for instruction. A whole course could even be put together using such questions. But the moment an individual or company decides, without permission, to take the work of another and tinker with it just enough to call it an original one, and to charge money for access to that material, a moral and legal line has been crossed. Besides, if no other questions measure up to official questions, then why bother using substandard material at all, either to teach or to learn? The official question pool is deep enough to prepare anyone, even the person shooting for a perfect score, for the task at hand. I also advocate cross-training—using tutor- or instructor-selected LSAT Logical Reasoning questions for supplemental CR practice, or LSAT or GRE® RC passages—for those students who worry about exhausting the official question pool, or who want to preserve the more challenging questions for later in their studies.

I know from previous discussions, vv65, that we agree that companies should not write unrealistic, one-note SC questions to test grammar when a better way to do so would be to direct, say, a second-language learner of English to appropriate materials, whether free (e.g., Purdue OWL) or paid (e.g., a guide book).

- Andrew