Comment Re:MOD PARENT UP (Score 1) 693
Ok, so what if the professor cannot guarantee whether or not a student cheated? For example, the methods he seems to be using are looking for the same mistakes, that types of errors, things that would pop up when you recognized the question and just regurgitated the answer rather than approaching the question from your own understanding. What if a student "somewhat" cheated? Their exam looks sort of correct but slightly fishy. And he knows that there is at least some cheating but can only nail down all the "certain" cheaters. So he has a couple of options:
1 - Risk false-positives (i.e. a student that did not cheat yet was unfortunate enough to answer close enough to be suspect) and have some innocent students expelled.
2 - Let some cheating go while punishing other cheating (enforcing the "if you can get away with it, it is alright to cheat"). This punishes students that did not cheat by seeing their peers succeed where they did not deserve it.
3 - Offer a way out for those that cheated to in some way redeem themselves (it is NOT easy to even go in private and admit to cheating; this type of thing while it shouldn't be glorified for these cheats, IS something that is worth learning and will serve later in life), and those that choose not to, get dealt with via the normal cheating rules of the school.
Why the extra chance? Because those that cheated and turn themselves in will STILL most likely fail and those did it without cheating will still get the mark they deserve. Additionally, it will teach any student that knew of the cheating, but that decided not to cheat that they should have had the balls to act BEFORE the test was taken (and it seems that at least one person MAY have known before the exam about the leaked test-bank).