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.
Most take-home exams specifically state whether you’re allowed to use other sources or cooperate. If not, many course syllabi or even campus codes of conduct have onerous defaults.
Instead of ragging on op for adhering to practices they may have had no hand in mandating, we should try to help them.
Having been on both sides of such academic misconduct, if your hands are tied in terms of the assignment parameters, I think reissuing solo retests is fine. This is likely a chronic issue though, and I’d be curious to know if you have any options in next steps should anyone fail.
I am. I’m telling them this is a stupid way to test students and not to do it. I doubt their institute mandates take home exams, so never doing them again is a great solution to prevent this from ever happening again.
I also think solo retests are fine, hence the suggestion of proctoring an exam. Because that’s what they should do in the first place, if they want to test the students knowledge.
And if the students fail the exam, they fail the exam.
I’ll go one further and ask what the advantages of a take-home even are? What’s the use case for them that isn’t “less work for the teacher at the cost of quality”?