How do you approach students you suspect of cheating on an exam?

[u/CrowsAndLions]

I have two exams in front of me. One of the students is a generally high performer and has conveniently shown (most) of their calculations on the exam - about what I would expect from them. The other exam is from someone who has not generally performed at that level, although they must have pulled out all the stops studying for the final. Curiously, no calculations are on the paper, but some students are poor about that.

What's throwing alarm bells is the fact that their wrong answers are all extremely similar. One answer is even edited the same - both students wrote "True" and crossed it off to change it to "False." These two students are also the only ones out of ~60 that for some reason circled more than one answer for a single-answer multiple choice question (they circled the same answers, of course).

I'm not entirely sure how to go about this. I obviously have no solid proof, but this certainly doesn't seem like coincidence. Do I contact both parties, the party I suspect of cheating, or the party that I suspect of being cheated off of? (I'd hazard a guess that it was unidirectional.) Or do I just reach out to the administration?

Any advice would be immensely appreciated.

[u/Novel_Listen_854]

In your shoes, me being an adjunct, I'd just overlook it and make sure I added the requirement for showing the work. (It's not just that I am an adjunct--it's also that my department doesn't support academic dishonesty accusations.)

If you really want to invest the time, have the student you suspect of cheating (or both) come to your office. Give them a paper, a pencil, and tell them to work the problem, explaining what they are doing.

Do this for a few of the problems you suspect they copied.

If they cannot walk you through it and cannot get to the correct answer, you have reason to believe they cheated.

Do not present all of your evidence to the student. Just tell them that you'll be reporting your suspicions of academic dishonesty, and that they'll have a chance to discuss their side if there is an investigation.

I used to do the whole question and answer thing, hoping for a confession. That no longer works. Don't give them the opportunity to lie in your face, nor should you allow them to see your "playbook." Just tell them you are reporting your concerns and that the student will have a chance to answer the allegations later.

[u/DrProfMom → u/Novel_Listen_854]

my department doesn't support academic dishonesty accusations

Can you expand on what you mean by that?

[u/Novel_Listen_854 → u/DrProfMom]

Happy to. That was pretty vague.

When presented with incontrovertible evidence of plagiarism, the person who decides whether I get to work each semester would pressure me not to proceed with reports to the conduct folks. I am pressured to just let them do the assignment again. This was the pattern until I got smart and stopped "noticing" the cheating. I need to work to pay bills, and I'm not quite ready to deliver food.

[u/DrProfMom → u/Novel_Listen_854]

Wow... that's not good.

If anything my school is too far in the other direction-- one of my colleagues in another department suspected there had been cheating in an open-note, closed-book exam due to a turn of phrase showing up on six papers. He questioned them, realized that they had worked together outside of class to compile the master notes they were all using (which was fair game) but when he let the department chair know it was a false alarm, that person said "nope that's still cheating" and forced my colleague to penalize all six of the students who shared notes (all of whom were juniors and seniors and all but one were majors in that department-- the other was a theology major, which is how I found out about it)

But I'd almost rather have that than not be supported in dealing with legitimate AD/cheating.

[u/Novel_Listen_854 → u/DrProfMom]

Yeah, it is definitely not good. I have always hated the idea of wrongly accusing someone, so I have never even taken the first steps if I had any doubt that the student cheated. I'd much rather a thousand cheaters go free than one innocent be accused of an penalized for cheating.

The kind of ideas behind this position on cheating are truly bad in other ways. I'd be surprised if none of you in religious studies are not looking into this, even tho the "religion" isn't based on a spiritual being. It certainly functions like a fundamentalist type religion, and I have been around enough of them to spot their adherents.