<p>@twoinanddone, why do you find it hard to believe?</p>
<p>You hear excuses like “everybody does it” by kids to justify cheating/lying. In this case, it’s actually true.</p>
<p>In 2012, 125 Harvard students out of a class of 279 violated the terms of their take-home exam saying they should not collaborate (some cut and pasted answers).</p>
<p>Do/did you find that hard to believe as well? Yet that happened.</p>
<p>I’m a prof, too, not in business school. If I verified this form of cheating, the minimum I would do is fail them on this assignment. The next step would be go give them a C in the course (unless their performance was already at C level, in which case I would give them a D or F).</p>
<p>If the person or persons who initiated the cheating fessed up and you were assured they were the agents, then I would fail them and perhaps lessen the penalty to others. In meantime, until you resolve this (since this is end of semester), I would give all the students a NG or Incomplete, contingent on their submitting original work to complete the failed assignment.</p>
<p>I would talk to my department chair, and provide information about why I am taking this action.</p>
<p>Elsewhere in this forum you can find a thread in which posters have proudly listed schools with Honor Codes as if the students there are different from others. Some even go so far as to imply there is no theft, either. A simple check of crime records exposes the delusion and these sorts of self-reported cheating polls should quell the remainder of the fantasies.</p>
<p>What’s important, is that there is an honor code in the first place, that students take it seriously (for the most part) and that the administration acts appropriately on reported violations.</p>
<p>Yep. And every state in the US has laws against murder, so therefore murder doesn’t happen in this country. </p>
<p>It sounds like the professor has already come up with a reasonable course of action. </p>
<p>If you have time in this semester, how about a new HW assignment to replace the past one? Did you think about this- maybe some did not admit it and are the real winners here. Only the honest ones are getting punished? And I would stop asking the same questions next year.</p>
<p>I didn’t say that cheating doesn’t exist, but question that half the class participated knowing it was against the rules and readily admitted guilt, not just a misunderstanding. If that is the case and this school is full of cheaters, then the school needs to make some big changes. If every professor in the school handles half the class cheating privately and no one ever goes through the procedures set up by the school to deal with cheating, nothing is going to change and may will figure they might as well cheat because nothing happens to the students.</p>
<p>You told the students that if they confessed that you would not fail them. Therefore, I don’t think it is right to give them anything below a C. If you do, you are also cheating (lying) and no more ethical than they were. Why are you questioning what you said to them? It takes a lot of balls for kids that age to admit they were wrong, and if you impose a different penalty than you originally said, they will never take the high road again…My D had a different, non academic ethical dilemma in HS where she was the only one that fessed up. The coaches were impressed that she did and I assure you that it was a character building experience for her. Hopefully your students will learn from this as well.</p>
<p>When I was at a big Midwestern business school (one that gets discussed on CC quite a bit) a generation ago, getting the answers from last year’s students was a very common practice. The fraternities used to keep file cabinets of the undergrad assignments and tests with answers for use by future students. The first year MBA students would also pass around papers obtained from second year students. I wonder if things have simply not changed much over the years.</p>
<p>Give yourself an F for failing to produce non repetitive tests. </p>
<p>@ GA2012MOM, I have no intention of failing them. It’s likely I’ll give the self-confessed cheaters Cs for the course. Not a single one tried to defend themselves. They knew that seeking out prior years’ students and copying answers verbatim was wrong. (In one case, they didnt even bother to hide their tracks - they simply left cell references to the prior years’ HW submission from another student.) I will get final exams today from the TA. She and I will decide then.</p>
<p>@xiggi , these are HW assignments, not tests. This is for business school and the probelms are complex. They take hours to prepare and hours to grade. I usually make subtle changes from year to year, but this year I didn’t.</p>
<p>You’ve got to realize your best resource is other profs at your school. And the dept chair. Not us. You didn’t create a new assignment and we don’t know what sort this was. We’re an odd place for this sort of advice.</p>
<p>What % of the total course grade was the homework assignment? If cheaters received a zero on it, would some cheaters’ overall course grade still calculate out to a B?</p>
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<p>Still, if the assignment is a large one that is a significant portion of the grade in the course, reusing the same assignment with no changes brings up the same issues that reusing the same tests with no changes brings up. This is particularly true if the number of correct solutions is limited (as opposed to where the number of correct solutions is very large, so that duplicated solutions become suspicious).</p>
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<p>Don’t you think that YOUR problem starts and ends there? You rely on a TA to grade and prepare tests. Any reason to believe that the TA is more creative and dedicated than you are? I assume you are not an adjunct and I think that the delegation of basic tasks and responsibilities are the Achilles heel of our education system. </p>
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<p>@xiggi , these are HW assignments, not tests. This is for business school and the probelms are complex. They take hours to prepare and hours to grade. I usually make subtle changes from year to year, but this year I didn’t.<<<</p>
<p>No sympathy here. Complex assignments can be broken down and are perhaps better tests. What is the inherent complexity here? Cases a la Harvard Business School? Income reconciliation with spreadsheets? Modeling? </p>
<p>I do not diminish the value nor the effort of creatin good tests, but I do not buy the forced recycling of tests. Chances are the students in your class picked yours for the history. </p>
<p>If a suggestion was still needed, here is what I would do. Offer to retake a new and stronger test for the final grade or have them losing a full letter score. The students could show their true colors.</p>
<p>So this was a complex spreadsheet, and people handed in spreadsheets made by students from previous years.</p>
<p>There’s no ambiguity here. Nobody is going to think that handing in someone else’s spreadsheet was legitimate. They cheated, and they knew they were cheating.</p>
<p>I’d give the students who confessed Cs if they redid a similar assignment themselves. </p>
<p>This is the same as handing in a paper written by someone else. This is obvious cheating, and everyone who did it knew they were cheating. No amount of talking about how the teacher should have changed the assignment alters the fact that the students blatantly cheated.</p>
<p>If you want my opinion, I would flat out eliminate homework grades from the final grade which would then eliminate any benefit for cheater’s getting that perk. I would come up with an original exams and proctor them v-e-r-y carefully. IMO, any out of class assignments are suspect for cheating these days, and homework should be for practice and questions to prep for the exam, not for grades at college level. You cannot monitor, much less control what is done outside of your classroom and vision, and that will take care of a lot of the cheating. </p>
<p>It’s a big issue at colleges, high schools too. My friend who teaches only grades in house things. Even then she gets cheaters for the things she assigns outside of the classroom. Why anyone bothers to cheat like that without it counting for a grade, I can’t fathom but they do. They hope it will somehow count, I guess. But some kids are so entrenched in cheating mode, that they can’t break it My friend also mixes it up from class to class so that questions and answers are not given out to those taking the exam later. The cheating is that prevalent. Most profs don’t seem to care unless it jumps right out at them. Too much work to put in the cheating controls.</p>
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<p>When I went to college, an on-campus student organization maintained an exam file for any student to check out old exams from. This was done with full knowledge of the department whose exams were in the exam file (and some of the faculty would drop off copies of the exams after using them). That practice both sent a message to the instructors to make different exams, and equalized access to old exams among the students.</p>
<p>Now, of course, the old exams are just put on web sites for everyone to look at.</p>
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<p>I don’t see how that works in classes like programming classes, writing classes and (it seems) this class, where students are expected to do time-consuming projects. An essay written over an hour or two is not the same as a research paper. Answering a few questions about programming languages is not the same as writing and debugging a program to do something. And answering a few questions about a spreadsheet is not the same as spending five hours creating a complex spreadsheet.</p>
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<p>This may not be practical for some types of courses, such as those where the point of the course is to have the students do some sort of project that realistically takes longer than a few hours that an exam takes, or requires research using outside resources. However, most of these projects are the kind where the number of correct solutions is infinite, so that turning in an identical solution as someone else brings obvious suspicion.</p>
<p>Agree that minor homework should be used mainly to give students practice, and should at most count for a minimal part of the grade, so that students cheating are mainly depriving themselves of practice, which will come back to bite them on exams.</p>