The Female Science Professor has been having a hard semester, and recently caught some students cheating on an exam:
In the situation I had to deal with recently, I saw one student glancing repeatedly at another student’s exam. I kept the two exams separate when they were handed in, compared the documents, saw the same strange but identical wrong answers on each one, and knew for sure that I had a Cheating Incident. I suppose if cheaters knew the answer to a question well enough to make a stab at it themselves, they wouldn’t write down the word-for-word strange wrong answer of the person sitting next to them.
My colleagues who have brought cheating incidents to the attention of the scholarly conduct committee that deals with such things say that it is not worth the effort, especially if the only things you have to go on are (1) observation of a student glancing at another student’s test; and (2) similarity of tests. What if the student was gazing into space or finding inspiration in the dance of the dust motes and wasn’t actually focusing on someone else’s test? What if the two students studied together? Yes, they studied together and somehow this studying together involved their practicing the same bizarre wrong answer to a question they anticipated.
I’ve never had an exam cheating incident (that I noticed, anyway), but I’ve had a couple of instances of pairwise identical lab reports. In one memorable class, I had three sets of them.
I can’t say I had a good experience with reporting the students in question to the Dean, but I did report the six students in that class. I talked to a bunch of different people about it at the time, and there were two good reasons people gave as to why they should be reported, even though it was an unpleasant experience all around:
The first is to establish a record. All of the students in that incident were in their first year of college, and they all got off with a slap on the wrist (0 on the assignment, which dropped their grades less than a full letter grade). The incident was recorded by the relevant Dean, though, and counted as the first offense for all of them. Had any of them been reported for plagiarism later in their careers, they would’ve automatically been sent to the next level of punishment.
Without that reporting, it’s theoretically possible for an unscrupulous student to cheat in several different classes, and get a slap on the wrist in all of them. Reporting them limits the scope of their possible unethical behavior somewhat.
The second reason is lawyers. Specifically, the fact that the college has well-defined procedures for dealing with academic dishonesty (or, at least, we have a document that lists well-defined procedures that are supposed to be followed). Failure to follow those procedures to the letter provides an opening for a litigious student to claim mistreatment.
I’m not sure there has ever been a case that has escalated to actual legal proceedings, but any lawyer can tell you that deviation from stated procedure opens the door to a world of hassle should it come to that. Which is why, tempting though it might be to handle the issue quietly yourself, you’re better off going through the proper channels.
Of course, the best strategy of all is to not have cheating cases in the first place. I’ve mostly avoided problems since hitting the trifecta in that one class, by giving a little speech about the limits of acceptable collaboration to the class before assigning the first lab report (lab reports are the only area in which I really have any chance of seeing actionable plagiarism– I don’t care if students work together on homework, and actually encourage it in most cases).
But if you do run across one, the best thing to do is to find out what the proper procedure is, and follow it.