WTF? My Teachers Says Someone Cheated, but She Doesn't Know Who

[Big 4 Country]

So my teacher informed the class today that someone cheated on a test, but she doesn't know who. How can she know someone cheated if she doesn't know who did it? She asked us to turn the person in if we know who it was. Has anyone ever heard of this situation before?

[djwhokid]

Originally Posted by Big 4 Country

So my teacher informed the class today that someone cheated on a test, but she doesn't know who. How can she know someone cheated if she doesn't know who did it? She asked us to turn the person in if we know who it was. Has anyone ever heard of this situation before?

She may have a guess but not enough evidence to punish the student.

The best bet for the class is for NO one to talk. However, once a student rats out, trouble.

Prisoner's dilemma - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

[Zen653]

If the test was multiple choice, perhaps two or more people had the exact same answers for every question. That would be a plausibly innocent scenario only if the students accused of cheating answered nearly every question correctly and shared a couple common wrong answers because they studied together outside of class and were therefore susceptible to making the same error. The group of students with identical answers would need to be large enough as to not restrict suspicion to an otherwise small number of students with matching answers. That's a low likelihood (say around 20%), but conceivable.

If, however, a group of students shared a lot of matching wrong answers, your teacher would know with 99.9% certainty that there was some cheating. She wouldn't, however, necessarily know who copied off of whom. Furthermore, if the matching wrong answers correspond to "right" answers from a different exam, then your teacher would have reason to suspect that someone in the class stole the answer sheet and supplied it to classmates with the same wrong answers. But the teacher wouldn't necessarily know who stole the answer sheet, and/or who distributed the answer sheet, without students in the class coming forward.

If this were an essay-based exam, and two or more students submitted the exact same answers word for word, then it's extremely clear that there was cheating because the likelihood of two people phrasing a long answer the exact same way is virtually non-existent. But again, there would probably have to be a large group of students submitting these identical answers for your teacher to address the entire class instead of the smaller group of two to three co-conspirators.

[Rapier]

She probably knows who was cheating but she can't get a warrant.

[DiamondDave]

Turn the dishonorable rat in

[Grandstander]

If she doesn't know, that means the cheater got away with it. And doesn't that serve as well as other forms of education in preparing kids for life? How can we expect kids to go out into the business world and cheat their way to success if they are denied practical experience at it while in school?

[Nighthawk]

What she most likely means is that, as Zen notes, there were two works of such striking similarity as to reject happenstance, but there wasn't clear evidence who the cheator and who the cheatee were. The hope is that someone else saw the event and rats them out, which happens pretty frequently.

[Rapier]

Originally Posted by Nighthawk

What she most likely means is that, as Zen notes, there were two works of such striking similarity as to reject happenstance, but there wasn't clear evidence who the cheator and who the cheatee were. The hope is that someone else saw the event and rats them out, which happens pretty frequently.

I think it is wrong to inject an accusation of cheating in this manner. As far as a copy from scenario, that would involve two "cheaters."

Unless the teacher left the room it was her role to observe for possible cheating during the test.

If cheating is suspected "fool me once" mode should kick in.

It's February. How could a teacher not know who was copying from whom?

[Zen653]

I think it is wrong to inject an accusation of cheating in this manner. As far as a copy from scenario, that would involve two "cheaters."

That's why I would lean towards my second hypothetical scenario where a student steals the multiple choice answer sheet to the Week 12 exam, passes it around the class for the Week 11 test, and 15 people get a 12/50, with the exact same 38 wrong answers. With that many people involved, you really have no idea who started the chain. If there were only a couple people involved, you would know that one or both of them cheated, and you'd address the issue with them, not the entire class.

[DiamondDave]

Even the best teacher is not going to catch every cheater, every time, through observation.... so when evidence after grading leans towards the high probability of cheating going on, I have NO problem with the teacher trying to isolate which students participated by using the observances of the other students....

[Nighthawk]

As far as a copy from scenario, that would involve two "cheaters."

This presumes that the effort was mutual, which of course it isn't always. If the cheatee does not know his or her work is being observed, how are they cheating?

How could a teacher not know who was copying from whom?

How could the teacher be expected to know? By investigating the incident. Which you seem to be against.

[Big 4 Country]

It was a spanish test with no word bank, 4 T/F questions about Panama that at least 50% of the class would know the answer to, and simple verb conjugation. It wasn't a matter of 2, or 3 students having A B B B B C C C A D D A B D D etc.

[bigheadache]

Donde esta el bano?

[Grandstander]

Hawk:

How could the teacher be expected to know? By investigating the incident. Which you seem to be against.

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."

[jtur88]

Maybe the teacher didn't suspect cheating at all, but was making a blanket statement to plant the seed that in the future, there would be a level of vigilance, so they had better not cheat. Purely psychological.