I am not a first-time instructor, but it is the first time this has happened to me: two students turned in absolutely identical assignments, down to formatting and everything.
The syllabus expressly prohibits working together on assignments. They have had access to the syllabus for several months now.
I gave last semester’s class the same assignment, and lots of people in the Greek system take this class–it occurred to me that they might have copied the assignment from last term; however, the work was pretty disastrously wrong. I couldn’t have given this assignment a good grade in the past. So I hope they didn’t copy it from someone who took the course before.
What should I do? I see two options:
Give them a stern talking to
Give them a stern talking to, and zero points on the assignment.
Why should they get any credit at all? If they worked together they violated the rules. If they copied something else it was plagarism. Fail them both.
Bring them both into the room, show them the papers and ask if they both thought you were totally stupid and wouldn’t notice two exact same papers.
Unless one of them fesses up to stealing the paper from the other, they both fail the exam. (My guess is, their facial expressions will pretty much let you know who wrote the paper and who copied the paper.)
Give them until tomorrow to work things out and get back to you.
If you think both of them worked on it together, then give them the talk and probably a 0.
If you think there’s a possibility one wrote it and the other stole it without their knowledge (very slim possibility, understandibly), you can print out the paper with key words missing. Give them each a copy and have them sit on oppisite sides of the room, and fill it out. If one can actually fill it out, chances are he wrote it. If neither can, then they probably got it from somewhere else.
This happened to me in high school. Someone asked to borrow my completed assignment, and I didn’t ask questions. It was a short assignment. Within a few minutes, he had copied the entire thing verbatim by hand.
When I got the poor grade back with a note about having turned in identical assignments, I was shocked.
I explained to the teacher that I had let the other guy look at it, but I didn’t think he was going to copy the entire thing. The teacher confirmed the story with the offending student and gave us the grades we each deserved… mine was ok, his was a zero.
I would tell them that unless they can give you a convincing explanation, you will fail them both on the assignment and that they would both be charged with plagiarism. Maybe the person who copied will fess up and then only one of them will have to be charged with plagiarism. Regardless, unless the original was stolen, both should receive zeroes. I have had to do this even in middle school-- both the copier and the copied get penalized.
You need to do a search and see if they both downloaded the paper off the Internet. This day and age it seems like that’s the most likely scenario; they independently both downloaded the paper, and didn’t realize that one of their classmates did the same.
Agreed with power sawyer. My first instinct was to fail them both and report them for plagarism, but talk to them first, get their explanation, and act accordingly.
At my undergrad school, there was little tolerance for that.
For a first offence:
0 on the assignment, referral to Student Judicial Affairs, followed by mandatory counseling. Since most assignment were large chucks of the course grade, this often meant a very low or failing grade for the class.
If there was another infraction, the student would almost certainly be suspended.
Any UC Davis Dopers are welcome to correct me. Is that still the policy in Aggie-land?