<p>EricLG, I would admire your sense of justice more if you put in the context of being equally fair to the accused. </p>
<p>Goaliedad, Well said. I especially agree with this,
</p>
<p>I abhor cheating but I am far less fond of an assumption of guilt. I also loathe attempts by those with power to influence the behavior of those with less power via threats with impossible deadlines so as to force a hasty decision.</p>
<p>Also on my list of things I view as vile are convicting two people because a person feels confident at least one of them did the act. It is far better for both to go free than convict a person wrongly. That stands from classroom to courtroom.</p>
<p>No. The college has every right (and the responsibility) to dictate the conditions under which its course exams are administered. They are also supposed to audit those conditions to assure that the testing conditions are being adhered to. This is how they preserve their academic integrity. </p>
<p>The professor is supposed to give the proctor the requirements for each exam administered including the time allowed, and the level of assistance allowed (open book or not, etc.) </p>
<p>When a professor has reason to believe that the testing requirements are being adhered to (like statistical evidence of cheating), it is incument on him to notify the college and the proctor that they suspect the proctoring is insufficient. If the proctoring is not corrected, the proctoring has to be suspended. If they are going to use statistical tools to detect proctoring failures (as a result of presumed cheating), they should fix the problem.</p>
<p>The proctors are agents of the college, even as subcontractors. Their use does not relieve the professor/department/college of the responsibility of assuring the integrity of their grading.</p>
<p>I agree. This isn’t a court of law, and this situation isn’t held to those standards. I’m not saying it shouldn’t be, it just isn’t. The professor has given very compelling evidence, in my mind at least, that cheating occurred. If I was on a jury in a civil court I would say cheating has occurred based on the statistical evidence the professor has offered. I’m not sure exactly what this school’s policies are on cheating, but if wouldn’t surprised me if all he has to do is prove the cheating occurred. He doesn’t have to go beyond that to find out exactly who knew and who was an innocent bystander.</p>
<p>I don’t get the proctor argument. If the proctor didn’t observe the cheating, then the cheating didn’t, couldn’t have, occurred? Even if statistically there is overwhelming evidence that it did occur? I think you’re selling short the (possible) ingenuity of the kid or kids involved …</p>
<p>Knock three times on the ceiling if you want me
Twice on the pipe if the answer is no</p>
<p>Professors have “a duty to preserve the integrity of their academic program” by following up on cheating cases according to their university’s procedures. Professors do not have to devote their lives to investigating each case or setting up sting operations with proctors. There is a reason honor courts exist. </p>
<p>And the reality is that professors who teach on-line courses are unlikely to have any control whatsoever over the remote testing environments.</p>
<p>Common sense and experience tell us that most of the time that cheating occurs, both parties are complicit and also that hard evidence of complicity is often difficult to come by. Thus, if (as I think most of us agree) there is strong evidence that somebody cheated here, it seems logical to have a presumption that both parties are involved, leaving it to the students themselves (who have access to the evidence) to rebut the contrary. Its like the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur in Torts.</p>
<p>Will this work injustice in some cases (including, perhaps, that of the OP’s son)? Sure. But you can’t expect perfection.</p>
<p>Pea, Would you still convict in light of:
-a respected teacher testified that as proctor they saw nothing
-in light of this students excellent academic record and no prior accusation of cheating
-it was pointed out that even if we accept the professors statistics (& he is not a statistician), then we still have no way of knowing which student cheated off the other
-therefore if both students receive a “WF”, then one of them will suffer the consequences despite having done nothing wrong</p>
<p>What if:
-a statisticians presented a different conclusion
-the professor had accused a student of cheating in the past who was cleared of the charge</p>
<p>For me, the big red flag was the effort to force an answer from the student’s parents in such a short window of time. This is a huge consequence for the student, and rightly so if they are guilty. I simply do not find it credible that an ethical professor with conclusive evidence would push for such a quick resolution as the only person that benefits is him.</p>
<p>EMM1, Now we’re going to put the fate of this student in the hands of “common sense” and the personal experience of those involved? </p>
<p>tjd, Unless the children have developed mind-reading skills while I fade into my dotage, then the proctor’s account remains important.</p>
<p>So now we have “common sense” plus student’s ability to cheat invisibly equaling conviction. </p>
<p>I never argued the actual statistics, but the USE of the statistics and the CONTROL of the experiment - the science behind the accusation.</p>
<p>If you believe that arguing the misuse of a statistical experiment with a university is a bad strategy, then you are suggesting that the administration (and thus the university) is against academic freedom. </p>
<p>Most universities respect criticism of the control of experiments. It is what improves scientific research. When a professor gets to pick which samples are used to make a finding, it flies against sound science. We don’t know if this other student cheated off of other students in the other tests (professor did not give info). Perhaps this was the other student’s favorite target? A further look at the data might reveal something. They didn’t even tell the OP if that research had been done! </p>
<p>These academic proceedings are often very lopsided against the student as the rules of discovery are generally not applied to these proceedings, so a professor can withhold relevant mitigating facts and shape the outcome. His communication indicating that he had overwhelming evidence (without sharing but the 3 or 4 test results) shows this prejudice and should be argued as unfair treatment.</p>
<p>And I’m not against lawyering up here. Quite frankly, the only thing the school has to fear is the loss of its reputation and generally they will back down if a lawyer can make the school look foolish in a public proceeding. And here, without substantive evidence of cooperation, they cannot prove that OP’s son did anything wrong, as it would appear that OP’s son did NOT benefit from the alleged conspiracy.</p>
<p>To those who say I’m doing the OP a disservice, I say you are telling them their child to be a victim and cop a plea to something you didn’t do.</p>
<p>tjd, I read gd’s posts as a football attempt: attack the other guy if your own defense stinks. As in, demand that the prof, proctor, university, and intel should have done everything in their power to prevent cheating, or else expect mitigating circumstances.</p>
<p>Only one, teeny, tiny problem: any honor code I have read demands that students do not cheat. Period. It doesn’t say “do not cheat if it is technically hard,” or “it is OK to cheat if the proctor is lazy,”</p>
<p>“EMM1, Now we’re going to put the fate of this student in the hands of “common sense” and the personal experience of those involved?”</p>
<p>No, we are making a the best judgment that we can based on our experience with cheating generally. Do you deny that most cases of cheating involve some collusion between the two students involved? Or that in many cases there will be no direct evidence that both were involved?</p>
You may be right, but my own limited experience doesn’t bear this out. I’ve only been aware of a few actual cheating cases in my life, either in my own school days or my son’s, but all of those have been of the “sneak a look at brainiac’s work” type rather than the complicit type.</p>
<p>EricLG, you’re getting into strawman territory. Nobody is saying that it’s ever OK to cheat. We’re just saying that investigations of cheating need to be conducted according to basic standards of fairness, even if that means that some cheaters get away with it.</p>
<p>So if we have it your way the OP’s son will be singing</p>
<p>Tie a yellow ribbon round the old oak tree
It’s been 3 long years, do you still want me?</p>
<p>because he’s just been punished for something that isn’t provable (the conspiracy to cheat).</p>
<p>We don’t know the relationship between the 2 students in question here (OP has not given that much insight) other than that they did not phone each other in the last month or so. If the 2 were unacquainted before the class (don’t know how big the HS is and they were in 2 different graduating classes) and were not observed to be social during the class, it is a bit presumptive to assume a conspiracy for the OP’s son to provide help during the exam.</p>
<p>On the other hand, if the 2 kids were in fact working together on the class (studying), it doesn’t address the potential that they collectively misunderstood in the same way the problems they incorrectly answered the same way. In this case, the test where the other student did not score well may have occurred because the OP’s son did not have time to study together (leading to different understanding of the answers). </p>
<p>From the OP’s posting, I would guess the first situation where the students did not have any relationship except showing up to the same class and thus no conspiracy can be shown. This would indicate that the OP’s son is an innocent victim.</p>
<p>While everyone else convicts on statistics, I wonder where their sense of how could this be a mistake got mislaid?</p>
<p>I can say that copying the complete answers from three separate tests would be unlikely to be anything but collusion.</p>
<p>Copying three answers might involve one person copying from another. Copying three whole tests? That’s hard, because if the person shifts even slightly during the test and block the view, the person will miss questions.</p>
<p>And if the students aren’t allowed to sit near each other? You can’t stare at somebody elses computer screen for the whole test and not get noticed.</p>
<p>There were 3 other students in the room. Did they see anything?</p>
<p>The OP said the two students studied together.</p>
<p>And, we’ve already established that </p>
<p>
</p>
<p>is not a plausible explanation that anybody would buy off on. You might think this makes sense but nobody else will agree that they both learned the material wrong but so well they both put down the same answers to 87 out 89 answered multiple choice problems.</p>
<p>Rule 2: If you are unlucky enough to be the vicitim of academic dishonesty, you too shall be punished, as it is your responsibility to make sure that all of your work is secured beyond the level of a national secret despite the fact that we control the testing environment.</p>
<p>You misread what I’m saying. I am saying LOOK AT COMMON SENSE SCENARIOS WHERE BOTH STUDENTS MAY NOT HAVE BEEN CHEATING before you throw both student out on their ears.</p>
<p>I have no idea if most cases of cheating involve some collusion between the two students involved. And neither do you. Unless you happen to know the peer-reviewed research off hand or have looked it up. </p>
<p>In my personal experience, I have known cases of both being involved and I would say an equal number of high ranking students who were cheated off of. I have a friend who had to spend an extra year doing his doctorate only after an investigation when it was revealed that a student also working on the project had cheated. Luckily, the student confessed he worked alone and the facts (not common sense which so often resists facts, not speculation) confirmed that. He nearly lost his not only his doctorate but his hard earned reputation. </p>
<p>So, my common sense and personal experience have led me to be far more likely to be open to the idea that a person acted alone in cheating. More than that, I am totally unwilling to make the assumption that two students acted together when there is evidence otherwise (the much maligned proctor) Whose common sense and personal experience should we go with? If we want to be fair, neither. We’ll find out the facts and weigh them in this case.</p>
<p>^ I’m pretty sure I have posted that at least twice on this thread.</p>
<p>We’ve established that cheating has happened, but we have no way of knowing who was involved or how it happened. The only two people that know that are the OP S and the other student.</p>
<p>(I have suspicions that it wasn’t a solo effort. But I’d never find the student guilt of academic dishonesty without listening to his story, seeing diagrams of room layout, and other information so I could make an informed judgment.)</p>
<p>Since the proctor did not observe them cheating, this can only lend credence to the idea that they studied together and misunderstood the material in the same way. In my study groups as a returning student in my 30s, we also reviewed our tests once given back. We typically got the same answers right and wrong (but not very many wrong, I have to brag) because of the reasoning we had come to as a group. Again, if we’re going to let “common sense” and personal experience be our guides, I’m coming to a different conclusion. </p>
<p>If someone, anyone, observed them cheating, that would be one thing. But the adult in the room only had to watch, what? five kids? And they saw nothing. That seems to be immaterial to you but I doubt very highly every member of a board would agree with you. And anything the students did together before entering the exam is not cheating.</p>
<p>My daughter was told a story by a current student of the school she is matriculating into this fall: the student was ill, and missed a test. The prof gave her the test to take home and hand in the next day. You can be quite sure that the prof and the school put a burden on all the students to not cheat, to prevent cheating, and to report cheating.</p>
<p>The kids sign an honor code, and cases of kids being dismissed for violating it are known. </p>
<p>Thinking about this thread, and knowing that colleges tend to be much stricter about cheating than high schools, I am not terribly surprised to hear that this cheating happened in a quasi-HS environment. This is not an excuse, just an observation.</p>