Some of my students cheated. Should I give them the opportunity to turn themselves in?

Question

So, this is an online test and some of my students have identical answers (including mistakes and typos!). My plan is to send an email to the class giving the cheaters a chance to come forward for a reduced penalty (scale down the grade based on the severity of the cheating). Otherwise, they will be reported to the university.

Is this an appropriate action? Any other/better suggestions?

Update: I reported the cheaters (~40% of the class). I believe it is the right thing to do given the reasons below in the answers. It is a bit disappointing though that many students have cheated (including who I believed were good students).

Answer 1

Punishments for academic misconduct should be standardized across your university. Check the university policy and follow it. If you are still unsure, ask your academic dean.

Instructor discretion can lead to inadvertent or unconscious discrimination.

Answer 2

Being a professor is hard work and requires one to develop expertise and make thoughtful decisions about many different issues. Fortunately, modern universities have taken one area — the handling of student misconduct — out of the hands of individual professors and created a way to treat it in a uniform way across the entire university (typically through a dedicated unit with a name such as Office of Student Misconduct). This creates obvious efficiencies and frees up professors’ time to handle the work that they are actually expert in and that only they can do.

By coming up with your own policy to punish teaching students, you will be:

1. Wasting your own time and mental energy on making decisions that others have spent more time thinking about, have more contextual information about, and are more competent to handle.

2. Running the risk that your policy will differ from the university’s policy, creating a source of unfairness and inconsistency.

3. Depriving the university of a record about the cheating students that might inform decision-making in the (near certain) event that some of them might be caught cheating again in the future by other professors.

These are the disadvantages of your approach. As for advantages, the only one I can think of is that the university-wide office for handling student misconduct is in some campuses seen by some professors as either inept, incompetent, needlessly strict, or needlessly lenient, and this creates a temptation for those professors to handle misconduct matters themselves — a kind of “vigilante justice”. I don’t know if this is your situation. But, if you don’t have information to suggest that your university will not handle the referral in a satisfactory manner, this argument doesn’t apply.

Answer 3

The correct course of action is to follow the university procedure.

1. You do NOT want to stray from the university procedure as it would allow students to challenge any decision made in the case. Moreover, it could also expose you to technical administrative actions should the university become aware you did not apply properly the institutional policy.
2. It is not clear that it is for you to decide if there is an academic misconduct. Certainly here it’s the job of the Dean or assistant Dean to verify and assess such allegations. You can accuse students of plagiarism, but you should not be the jury in the business.
3. It is not clear it is for you to decide the penalty. It may be that the students have prior offenses that you cannot know of because of confidentiality. If the allegations are upheld, someone else should hand the sentence (albeit here there is consultation between the Dean and the instructor).

This is NEVER a pleasant situation, so tread carefully, keep all correspondence, and let the process follow its course: this will ensure greater fairness for all involved, and will give confidence to all that such situations are dealt uniformly and not in an instructor-dependent manner.

Answer 4

As the lead faculty member at my college for anti-online-cheating efforts, I think the OP's initial plan is too lenient, and secondarily too subjective.

OP's initial plan:

My plan is to send an email to the class giving the cheaters a chance to come forward for a reduced penalty (scale down the grade based on the severity of the cheating). Otherwise, they will be reported to the university.

OP's motivation for this as per a comment:

... because this is the first offense (it is the first exam though), so I don't think jumping to reporting them is a good action. I may be wrong.

In line with other answers, I do think the OP should follow the standard institutional policy for academic integrity cases as soon as possible. In addition to the prior reasons, I would add this:

If these are university students, then it seems to me overwhelmingly likely that what's happened is a reflection of prior habits they've been following for... maybe 12+ years now? I'd say at this point it's naive to think this is truly "the first offense". What if these students are cheating at work in every single one of their college courses, and then pleading "first offense" or "didn't know" (very common, and should be disregarded as utterly unbelievable), and so are given this allowance continually throughout their program sequence?

My broad guess is that they've probably been given many "first offense" allowances over time, they've been either unpersuasive (or worse: evidence there is never any real penalty), and as a university instructor who cares about academic integrity (you've already spent the time to investigate this!), it's time to apply the putative penalty, so as to get the actual message across.

Moreover, as others have stated, the central Academic Integrity Officer is likely to maintain university-wide records, and decide or recommend increasing penalties for students who have had prior reports filed. (At my school, the available reports actually span 25 different campuses in our university system, in which transfers are common.) Having every instructor silo their own "first offense" process short-circuits that mechanism.

For these reasons, under the assumption that university students are expected to be previously aware of the rules (perhaps by reading syllabus information or other student materials, etc.), and also fairly long prior academic experience, I recommend assessing roughly the harshest penalty for cheating on tests possible. In my case, the default is a zero in any such case. I've found that assigning this as a "pending" null grade to the assignment makes students much more prompt about responding to cheating investigation inquiries (which otherwise go unreplied or "ghosted" in many cases). Perhaps more importantly, the OP's initial "scale down the grade based on the severity of the cheating" idea sounds vague and likely to result in bias or irregularities if they don't have a specific expected level of sanction decided in advance.

Also, I would generally avoid sending any course-wide messages out about the situation. That's because: (a) it's probably irrelevant, and possibly confusing, to the majority of students, (b) it fills the course mental space with negative chaff, and (c) it's probably a sign of instructor laziness, in that they couldn't bother to send a message to the specific students under investigation, which is the appropriate thing to do.

Answer 5

I'm not going to pretend to know the "right" ethical and practical solution to your situation. I've never experienced this as an instructor before somehow. But the way I see it is that you have two options:

• follow the ethics code exactly as written by the university; or
• attempt to resolve the issue "internally" (i.e., keep it separate from the official disciplinary processes). this involves punishing the transgressors equally and befitting the severity of the misconduct (such as giving everyone involved a 0 on the exam), and then making it abundantly clear to the class, in a formal statement in front the entire student body, that cheating occurred in this specific way: if any student cheats again, they will face the possibility of an automatic failing grade for the class and possibly expulsion pursuant to the college code of conduct.

Obviously, the second one is trickier to do correctly, but more forgiving. So there's that trade-off. And in addition (this is going to sound disconcerting) it's probably safer for you to go with that possibility if you're tenured, in the event that something goes wrong with your internal solution (such as students claiming undue punishment, unfair or unequal treatment, or some kind of bias, even along racial lines or gender lines (I hate to bring these up, but accusations do happen, some of them true and some of them false)).

The key is to have incontrovertible proof that each person getting punished committed the "crime". And then punish them all identically. And finally explain exactly what happened to the entire class; the only thing that you need to omit is the names of the students who cheated.

---

As an aside, I want to tell a story of something that happened when I was a sophomore in Proofs, Induction, Set Theory, and Arithmetic class. A student posted a question from a homework assignment onto math.stackexchange.com – or maybe it was simply Stack Overflow or Stack Exchange at the time – and received answers. Viable answers. I was not aware of it. Several students copied the solution. It was a course / problem in which dozens of unique solutions could successfully evaluate in a sufficiently rigorous way. As such, it was obvious to the TAs and professor as to who copied the solution, at least to a certain approximation and confidence level.

The professor opened with a direct announcement the next lecture. He claimed he knew the full list of students who cheated (this may have been a little game theory and behavioral manipulation at work). His gambit was this, involving three possible outcomes:

• the cheaters could reveal themselves immediately and apologize to the class for compromising the integrity of the course, and receive the least punishment
• they could speak to the professor after class and receive a moderate punishment
• they could do nothing and receive the worst punishment

I think they did the 2nd of those choices. But I can't be sure. All I know is that they didn't openly admit to the class. I don't even think he expected them to; it was partly a psychological game to get people to approach him afterwards.

I'm not saying this is the best way to handle your situation, but it was a memorable circumstance.

Answer 6

The key is that you're assuming this is a first offense. You don't know. Maybe they got caught cheating in every other on-line exam and they all get a verbal warning for a 1st offense, then again next semester. There should be a central academic dishonesty person who handles these things, and is good at it. They will know if it's a 1st offense.

Double-check you have a solid case (identical spelling errors is good), make notes, ask the students to come see you in a way that isn't too terrifying, figure out if everyone copied from Alice w/o her knowing, or whatever. Write it up with names and dates and the class name and what they said, and send it to the Academic Dishonesty person. Tell the students that for a 1st offense they will get yelled at, but nothing more. Mostly it gets written down (not on their diploma or anything like that, only for their time in college) so if it happens again they can't say "but I didn't know!" If they ask if it will show up for security clearance checks, it will, but it's no big deal. So as not to keep them in suspense, let them know it's your decision as far as grades go, decide ahead of time, and let them know if they confess (otherwise you have to wait. Most students eventually confess). Check their grades -- they may have been failing anyway, so it hardly matters. Let them know that if they retake the class with you, you won't take it personally (you're a busy person and don't have time to remember who did what last semester).

But don't believe me. See if you have an Academic Dishonesty person. They probably have a hand-out or something, or it's on the web page.

Answer 7

It may be a good idea to confront them with your findings and ask for their explanation. There just might be a reasonable one (I can't think of one, but...). You do not give them a way out, but follow school procedures. If they willingly cheated, they know also fully well, they have to face consequences. They may be dumb, but not THAT dumb, being allowed to study at a uni. You cannot cheat "a little", btw.

Answer 8

At many (most?) schools, faculty and students are expected to report all cases of suspected cheating they observe. You're expected to report everything because it's not your job to decide the case. That's the job of the academic conduct officer or perhaps an honor council. Your job is only to report what you see. If you later become aware that your suspicion was completely unfounded, many (most?) schools will allow you to retract your report with an explanation.

If you're faculty and reporting a student for suspected cheating, I don't think it's necessary to notify them before you submit your report. (Again, it's not your job to investigate or decide the case.) But I think it's good practice to notify the student that you have reported them and to provide a copy of the evidence you submitted (but redacted of any other students' names or identifying information, e.g., if the evidence is two identical exams) along with a link to a university academic policy page (if there is one) explaining the process by which the student's case will be decided.

Answer 9

The "cheaters please come forward now" scenario would require a lot of trust in the current (and possibly the future!) misconduct policy... maybe too much. And some cheaters might come forward, while others might decide to keep quiet. How would one handle that?

And report what? You cannot prove beyond doubt who was copying and who was authoring answers. And the author might have been cooperating, but might also still be completely unaware of the problem. Therefore I'd suggest this:

• a unique and correct solution is worth full marks.
• any identical submission appearing N times is worth 1/N each.

This addresses both sides: the author (lesson: "don't provide knowingly or accidentally a solution to others, it will lower your marks"), and the cheaters (lesson: "a copied solution isn't worth much").

If someone is unhappy with your suggestion, offer to forward the problem to the place which usually handles academic misconduct at your university.

Answer 10

As suggested by the answers here, you should report that ! wait, you report what ? first degree cheating ? what about 2nd degree cheating and 3rd degree cheating as well ? the recurrent mistake made by professors, is that they only catch the easy prey while omitting the most wicked cheaters. Cheating has many ways, you could cheat by sitting and preparing the exam with your mate, you could do that in group as well (while many others prepare the exam alone (which is penalizing them)). Yes i consider that cheating in comparison with lonelisome students who do their hardest to prepare ALL by their own. Anyway you are only in doubt and that doesn't constitute a crime for the "cheaters".