Hawk:
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How could the teacher be expected to know? By investigating the incident. Which you seem to be against.
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Most of the time, not much was accomplished by such investigations, at least not in my experience. When it is a situation of apparently duplicated work, one of several scenarios may apply:
1) The easy (or should be easy) situation where one of the two had consistently produced good or excellent work, while the other student consistently produced poor or horrible work...and now they both have produced identical work. Well....duh. Then the problem becomes one of determining if the smart person cooperated with the not so smart one, or a situation where the not so smart one simply stole from the smart one without the smart one knowing.
2) The students involved with the duplicated work are more or less on equal academic footing.....then it is a situation where the only way to discover the truth is if one or both confesses. If both maintain that they were honest, it might be that both are guilty, or that one is guilty and one was victimized without knowledge. That's the worst situation, impossible to resolve without a confession or some direct, indisputable evidence.
3) The students involved in the duplicated work are all the sort whom the teacher would have regarded as incapable of producing such work on their own. In such a case, then you have a third party, unidentified, who was responsible for the actual work and provided it for the cheaters.
And of course in all scenarios, you have nothing but vehement denials on the part of everyone.
So...what do we do? Have it resolved by the teacher making a value judgment and condemning those he or she feels most likely to have cheated? Do that while the kid continues to deny and in an eyeblink you'll have some hotheaded parents on your back demanding to know how you could possibly charge sweet little Larry or Margarita with cheating. And if there is any sort of racial or ethnic division among the possibly guilty parties, designating one as innocent and another as guilty is certain to introduce the race card...as in "You let the white kid have a pass on this but claimed the black kid was cheating"....and of course clearly you only did this because you are a racist. It would not matter that the white kid may have been a straight A student since the beginning of the year and the black kid a slow witted thug, it was racism, pure and simple. And if the roles were reversed and it was the black kid who was smart and the white kid who was the laggard, it wasn't unusual to encounter white parents who fully expected you to side with them and their kid no matter what...of course it was the black kid cheating, can't you see that my little Dennis is white?
I've mentioned that I didn't truly enjoy teaching all that much, and the frequency of scenarios such as are described above, greatly aided in inspiring my desire to get out of the profession. After a few years of these sorts of dustups, I instituted a personal policy of ignoring all cheating possibilities save only the most blatant and undeniable ones. If I did not catch them redhanded and have evidence to prove the case, I said nothing, I did nothing. My standing joke before every test became "Okay class, books, papers and guns under your desk, the test is going to start. Cheating is allowed, but getting caught cheating is not."