I gave my students a take home exam over spring break. (This is normal where I teach) 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. 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?
Edit: I gave them the Tuesday before spring break until the Thursday after. I didn’t want it to be right before or right after.
When I say normal I mean giving take home exams.
Give points for showing work. Correct answers are only worth a small portion of the overall grade, with full points given only if all steps are shown correctly. Of course, this has to be established from the start of the school year. Changing grading policies now would be unfair.
If you don’t want students using outside resources don’t give them take-home exams. You must be new to teaching.
Yeah, OP should take this as a opportunity to work on assignment design and course policies for the next time. There have been plenty of times where students did something that I viewed or suspected as dishonest but didn’t report them for it because I hadn’t designed my assignments well or didn’t have a clear policy against it.