Comment by btrettel

The comments here are interesting. My experience has been that cheating is too much trouble to deal with, but I can see that's others have had more success. Might depend greatly on the personalities involved.

Once I was a TA for a class and a student came to me asking for a regrade on part of one exam. They claimed that I unfairly gave them zero on a particular problem. I looked at it and yes, I did give them a zero. But I never give zeros on a larger problem unless nothing or almost nothing is written down. I think that I'm quite generous for gibberish even. There is no way I would have given this student a zero for this problem if he had what was present at my office hours. I told him that I believe he is trying to cheat by doing the problem after the exam. I didn't report him but I did make it clear that I didn't believe his story.

The student went to the lecturer, who was furious with me. The lecturer said that I had no clear evidence that he didn't do the problem; me saying that I never give a zero unless the problem is not attempted wasn't good enough for the lecturer.

I spoke with my advisor, who said that to avoid problems like that he puts a line through any problems that were not attempted.

The lecturer didn't like the line solution after I graded the next exam. He was furious with me again. He told me "You don't trust your students!" I don't trust some students, sure. Since putting the line through empty parts I haven't had anyone claim anything similar, though.

The lecturer was apparently so disappointed with me that he told my advisor to kick me out of his research group (or something along those lines). I didn't learn that until years later. My advisor told me at the time that the lecturer had a reputation for being a jerk to his TAs, so I figure my advisor just thought this lecturer wasn't worth listening to.

(To his "credit", the lecturer had another issue with me that he got furious over: He had a very particular system for writing grades on exams. As I recall on the back page on one of the top corners he wanted the total points received written over the total on the exam. On about 5 out of about 100 exams I wrote the wrong denominator by accident; the numerators were correct in all instances as far as I recall. Now, I'm sorry to have made this mistake but it wasn't on a number that mattered and it was only on a small number of exams. This issue combined with the cheating is all rather minor and not worth raging over.)

I did keep putting lines through empty parts when grading, at least after I stopped TAing for this class. But this experience made me reluctant to give a zero for cheating, much less report the student to the university.