How to go about an unclear academic misconduct

Question

In a lab I supposedly conducted academic misconduct by sharing my paper after the time was up. However, in the lab we are allowed to coordinate with our peers and ask questions about the processes of our work just not share the final answers. There are two TA’s in a lab of about 30 students who answer questions. My friend and I finished with about 10 minutes to spare and we started conversing with a neighbouring student. This student closed his computer (where his computations were) and handed in his paper to the TA at about 1 minute left. The lab included a cryptography decoding problem which we used matrix multiplication integers to get the corresponding letter to figure out the code (hence the computations). Out of goodness of his heart he came back in a rush saying the TA told him he needed the numbers. I knew he closed out his computer and I had my sheet in front of me and I could see he got the right answer as well as I did. So, I made the judgement that it is not sharing final answer but process especially because the TA told him to fix it with such little time. I hand him my paper and he is writing it down while the lab coordinator comes in and starts collecting papers saying “stop writing” he kept writing the code it was quite small and the coordinator saw I was without paper and my new friend has my paper beside him and declares 0’s. I politely questioned the fairness and he strictly said I have no right to argue. The TA didn’t say anything in our defence even though the situation was clearly not cheating. It’s a very flexible style- notes out, people walking all over the place to other parts of the lab for confirmations.

What is the best way to handle this situation?

Answer 1

Apologize, show that you understand what you did wrong, and let it go. Maybe ask for some way to make up the grade if it's critical/worth a lot.

Unless I'm misunderstanding something, this sounds an awful lot like cheating... A student handed in an assignment without "showing his work" and was asked to write out his process. You let him copy your work because you decided he had the right answer. Then, on top of that, he ignored instructions to stop writing and the lab coordinator saw that he was clearly copying your paper.

I think there is no way to defend this, even with the generous rules of the class. Just because you can talk and look through your notes doesn't mean you can just copy each other. I'll lay out the biggest issues:

1. I'm not sure that copying down someone else's work is following the spirit of the rules.
2. Even if they were inclined to let that part slide - your professor and the TA's have no way to know that he wasn't copy down your answers as well (which seems to be explicitly against the rules).
3. It isn't really your place to decide that "...he got the right answer..." and therefore could just copy your work.
4. He kept writing after being told not to.
5. You didn't have your paper/were obviously complicit.

The situation seems like it was impossible to ignore. So you both got 0's. Any attempt to fight this or escalate will probably not go well for you. I think that getting a 0 is one of the better outcomes here.

Answer 2

1. You would benefit from splitting your post into paragraphs

2. Like others have said, you let him copy your work which is explicitly against the rules of "no copying answers" so there really isn't much arguments to be made here.

I think this is a valuable lesson that helping someone cheats rarely ends well for you. There is a misconception that as long as you didn't cheat its okay. In most cases, the person who is helping someone cheat gets punished just as severely as the person who is cheating, if not more if it is a large-scale case.

To actually answer the question: Your best course of action is to literally just move on with your life. There is really nothing meaningful you can do aside from maybe apologising to the TA (but don't expect brownie points). Shit happens and we live and we learn. If this is any reassurance, it likely won't go on your official record/transcript (I mean the 0 score would but not the misconduct), so in the grand scheme of things this really is a pretty good outcome for academic misconduct