Asklemmy

I gave my students a take home exam over spring break. (This is normal where I teach)

If this is normal, that just means a lot teachers have no respect for personal time.

One of the questions was particulary difficult. It came down to a factor of three in the solution. That factor inexplicably appeared with no justification on many of their exams.

So? Are you saying a lot of them cooperated on it? Did they copy work from a separate source? Where is the problem?

You assigned graded work during a vacation, which I would assume means you can use any material you have access too, including teamwork and the entire internet. Does it not?

I intend to have the students I suspect of cheating come to my office to solve the problem on the board.

And if they fail, what does this prove? That they can't reproduce an answer constructed over (potentially) many days of work with references on hand, in a few minutes of high-stress with their teacher breathing down their neck?

What would you do?

Not send graded work home with students if you don't expect them to cooperate. Procter an exam if you want them to use only their brains.

In fact, you should procter an exam during your vacation, because they didn't get one either.

You will probably get better answers if you ask this in a community dedicated to teaching/professors. Posting on general asklemmy seems like you're going to get flamed a bit.

I gave my students a take home exam over spring break. (This is normal where I teach)

That is rough. Nothing you can do about it this time, but, in the future, I wouldn't recommend giving work over break even if others are doing so. Breaks are there for a reason.

It came down to a factor of three in the solution. That factor inexplicably appeared with no justification on many of their exams.

It's hard to say without seeing exactly what you mean, but this sounds a little flimsy. You want to be pretty sure before you accuse someone of cheating. You can always just mark the answer as wrong if they didn't prove to you that they understand it.

I intend to have the students I suspect of cheating come to my office to solve the problem on the board. What would you do?

If I strongly suspected cheating, I would probably do something like that. Just be aware that the environment is different from a paper exam, so you need to be lenient. They are not used to standing in front of a board and working while someone watches. Also, a problem on a take-home exam could be worked on for hours, whereas you presumably expect them to do it quickly. You may need to give them the solution they wrote and see whether they can explain it to you. Or, give them most of the solution, but have them fill in some missing details that they should know if they actually did the problem.

Also, as others have said, there was no cheating unless you were very clear on what resources were allowed and not allowed on the exam.

FWIW, I do strongly disagree with the folks who are saying that any take-home exam should be open-everything. The argument that you will be able to do it in your career doesn't hold water. School isn't the workplace. Students are working on simple problems to build up skills that they can use to solve more complicated problems later on. If people want workplace rules about collaboration in the classroom, then the problems need to be scaled up accordingly. In many schools, that does happen later in the curriculum with things like senior projects or some project-based upper-level courses. But, teaching that way from the start wouldn't give students the time and support they need to gradually improve, so allowed resources need to be scaled back accordingly to account for the deliberate oversimplification of the problems.

On a more personal note, sorry that you have to deal with this. Everyone can appreciate that the situation is tough for the students, but a lot of people don't realize that dealing with cheating is also very stressful and disheartening for teachers.

A bigger picture may be; why is sending kids home for break with homework. It is my opinion, that people learn better when they actually have a break during their break. in my opinion, this is a tactic to prepare kids to think its normal to work all the time. That breaks are never actually breaks.

Yeah you have a take home test over the holidays, fuck that

Throw the question out, but offer extra credit to anyone who can show their work.

Did they cheat? You were lazy & let them take an exam at home. Sounds like you should’ve expected them to use any resources available. Just because something is normal, doesn’t mean it’s right.

I’m sure your students love you…

What were the rules for the exam? Were you clear what resources were acceptable and which weren't?

Especially for a take home exam, establish a rule where you give points for showing work as well as for correct answers. It's almost impossible to enforce a perfect honor policy for a take home exam, so you should have structured your grading to account for that.

Wait. How do you think they got this "factor of three" and what rule did they break in doing so?

A take-home exam implies open book, open internet, open ask-another-student, etc. It's not really for gauging how well the students have the concepts down. It's for giving the students incentive to go review the material again to hopefully make it stick better. Wherever they got the answers is fair game for a take-home exam.

If they didn't show their work and you've made expectations for showing their work clear, then mark off points for not showing their work. But this isn't a "cheating" thing.

If you sent this test home with them with the instructions that it's not open book and you think they used the book or internet or whatever, then... well, that was kinda... a bad idea. Don't do that again. And if you really think it's necessary (but only if you really think it's necessary), you could create a new test and give it in person in place of the take-home exam or just remove that test from consideration of the grade for the whole class. It might make you unpopular to pull a stunt like that (and, honestly, if it all went down the way it sounds like... you kinda deserve it if you punish them for your misstep) but definitely don't punish the class for your mistake any more than that.

Not the same thing, but when I was proctoring an exam I saw someone very un-sneakily using their phone, so I quietly sat down next to them for the rest of the exam as a quiet threat (then of course let the prof know when they turned in their exam too).

I think getting them to show their work is appropriate and for any that can’t replicate their work explain to them the downfalls of cheating. The other comments here justifying likely haven’t ever been in an academic setting. Relying on cheating is setting yourself up for failure if you intend to continue studying at a tertiary level.

I don’t think a punishment is necessary for cheaters just a lecture. Let them know people can and have had their degrees rescinded years after the fact when their cheating was detected with newer methods.

Edit: downvotes for suggesting that cheating is bad lmao. Like I said cheating at uni is easily detected these days. Fuck the getting caught, you’re paying however much to get an education, you may as well actually learn.

Nothing.
Having any homework for the holidays is already enough. Of course most of them would just want to have that gone ASAP.

What does cheating mean in this context? What did they have access to that you wish they hadn't? And if that's the case, then why did you make this a take home exam?

I'd ask them to come in and redo the problem on paper at the same time, if many have the answer without any calculations, the moment you got the first one in your office, the others would be aware of what's going on.

Leave it. Life's hard enough, just let em have the W before the real world bursts their bubbles more.

Wait, you gave them work over their spring break? What the fuck?? Let them have a damn break!

If you don't want students to work together and learn from each other don't give home assignments. It's not like they won't be able to work together irl

There has to be evidence of their process for me to accept it as evidence of understanding/ability. I have made it clear to them that this is necessary. Their job is to convince me that they know what they're doing. (But... I'm teaching HS Mathematics). So .. I'd mark it wrong/incomplete. I'm also working on student understanding of consequences of their actions, so wouldn't give them another opportunity on that exam. They would need to improve things on the next exam.

Of course they cheated on a take home exam. If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying.

Proctor your exams if you don't want them to be able to utilize any of the resources at their disposal. Making them do it again in front of you sounds like bullshit imo, but I am certainly not an academic.

I've seen various ways to handle it. My favorite is to grade the rest of the exam extremely harshly, where even a minor mistake could get full points taken off. Unfortunately, it's extremely difficult to prove cheating. I've had students copy word-for-word from Google and that still wasn't enough evidence. I don't think even having the students solve it in the board could convince the higher ups to do anything

Probably treating as “forgetting to write down their steps” before jumping to cheating; presumably you’ve been teaching them to show their work and they forgot to do that here.

Give them the chance to show you how they solved it on the board, if they can then great! Give ‘em the points and send em on their way. If not, then give them a zero for that part of the test and move on.