Is this cheating?

Question

So in one of my AP classes, my teacher gave us a part of the 2008 exam as a final.

She told us ahead of time that it would be that exam and that if we wanted to we could find the questions online. Many people in the class found a forum where students were discussing what they put as anwers for certain questions on that exam. Our teacher found someone with a copy of the answers from that forum and is now telling us that we cheated and gave us a new exam. I did fine on the new exam so I don't really care about that, but I'm still wondering, is this really considered cheating?

1) The answers on that forum were not definite, they were just students discussing how they did the problems

2) They were only numbers, and not explanations, to get any credit at all we still needed to know how to do all the work.

3) We did not have the answers during the test, we were simply looking at them before the class

I have many more points but I'm running out of space so I can't write any more

Answer 1

So I ran out of room explaining myself in my first post so I logged on to another email to continue further...

4) My teacher told us that it was fine to do the uestions ahead of time, and that we could even discuss how to do specific questions with one another. (the website was basically students discussing answers, so the only difference is we don't know those people)

5) It did not take a lot of time to look I typed in the name of the exam to find the questions on collegeboard, and the first link that popped up on google was the collegeboard site to get the question, and the link right below that was of the forum. And only one person in our class did not find the answers and give them to someone else, at least five different people went to the same forum on their own and printed off the answers before they knew that enyone else did it too.

6) Our school's integrity policy defines cheating as something that give you and unfair advantage over someone else, and everyone had access to all those answers

I talked to people who had taken the class previous years and they all said that they had gotten answers prior to the test too (which would not make it right but still...)

Anyways she is very mad at us right now and people are scared of arguing for fear of her just giving them a zero.

Answer 2

I agree with the above.  That seems really unfair.

Answer 3

Rule of thumb if you did not know the answer , and got it from another source other then your brain. Its cheating.

If you studied for the exam then you have nothing to worry about with a new exam.

Answer 4

If your teacher told you that you could find the questions online, then it's obvious that the students are going to find the answers, too. I don't see anything wrong with that.

Answer 5

Its not cheating.

Anf of course you were going to find answers online, so why would she say you could find the questions?