<p>I’ve read through the whole thread.</p>
<p>As a college prof, I’m really conflicted about the issues it raises. [It does, however, confirm my own instincts of NOT relying on multiple choice tests. Free response questions are harder to grade, but easier to spot potential cheating in my opinion.]</p>
<p>Some random thoughts:</p>
<p>The idea of honor is really important to me: I don’t think that colleges (or high schools) should bear excessive responsibility to prevent cheating—on their <em>honor</em> we expect students to turn in work that is their own. Many honor codes require students to put into writing (or sign) a pledge that explicitly states they have neither received NOR GIVEN any help to another student on the test/assignment AND to the best of their knowledge they are unaware of any cheating on other students’ parts. Under this kind of an honor code, if the OP’s S knows or suspects the other student of cheating, then he’s obliged to come forward with what he knows or suspects.</p>
<p>A college’s system for resolving accusations of cheating and other forms of academic dishonesty is NOT a court of law. Never has been and never will be. So we can talk about “standards of proof of guilt” all we want, but the fact remains, that the college will have it’s own standard of proof and that that standard does not have to be as rigorous as the standard in a court—particularly a criminal court. The more relevant standard may be the standard that an employer must provide to fire someone “for cause” In other words, from the college’s point of view, disciplinary action against a student for cheating may well be more like a company taking disciplinary action against an employee.</p>
<p>In my own humble experience, most profs are reluctant to raise <em>formal</em> charges of cheating as they typically involve a significant amount of work to document and that documentation has to be provided to the student, the honor court (if there is one), the chair and/or the dean (if the college doesn’t have an honor court). The sad, unfortunate fact is that many professors will ignore routine, small amounts of cheating that are hard to prove: If you see really similar and weird errors on one or two free response questions that seem to indicate student A may have copied from student B, but the rest of the tests don’t look that similar, you give both students a 0 on that question and move on. Of course, the students pick up on this, and the worst cheaters (the ones who get caught) typically push the issue until it can no longer be ignored.</p>
<p>But trying to defend oneself from a cheating allegation of the sort that the OP’s S seems to be in is, alas, a difficult task: How do you prove a negative? Simply saying, “I didn’t copy and I don’t know how John Doe copied <em>all</em> of my work on three tests when the proctor didn’t notice anything,” doesn’t seem satisfactory, but how can you provide evidence that something <em>didn’t</em> happen and that you <em>didn’t</em> have any knowledge?</p>
) If Student 2 was so smart as to memorize all those questions, he should have been smart enough to memorize the correct answers before the exam.</p>