Finish up with a class discussion of several case studies of situations that have arisen in C10. These could include a subset of the following (perhaps put each on a power point slide and project it). Some comments from the author are given in parentheses at the end:
The final exam was this morning, and all the GSIs have just finished grading. You are back in your office when one of your students knocks on your door. They are very distressed about the final, and is standing next to you at your desk. The conversation goes something like this: “I think I am going to fail the class. I know the final is curved, but I don't know if that cuts it. How much does HW and lab count towards the grade again? *sigh* I don't know what happened, is there *pause* anything *pause* I can do?” You assure the person they probably are fine and quickly look at the final grades and see this person is getting a 'C'. (As the head GSI, I was able to access the final grades at this point. A normal GSI would not have been able to do that…)
You have decided that Facebook-friending your students is OK. This is the 21st century and social networking is here to stay. When you're on Facebook one day, one of your students opens up a chat window. It is friendly at first, and somehow gets into him asking for help on one of the homework problems. You take the time to help him. Once that is done, he starts to talk more freely and begins sharing personal stories, including how he came out to his parents recently, etc. (Friendship with students, establishing boundaries, etc)
You see that one of your students copied his homework directly from the solutions. You request a meeting with him, and need him to sign the academic misconduct form (which doesn't go on his permanent record, and only gives him a 0 on the assignment when the worst 3 grades are dropped). He shows up to your meeting with his mom, who flew in from LA, and insists that as she works at JPL, she has taught her children to be responsible citizens and wants an exception for her son's behavior (which he claimed happened while blackout drunk).
One of your students is DSP, and claims that even though she took the quiz during the DSP session, the room was too loud and distracting for her to complete the quiz. You let her take another GSI's quiz in a room by herself, which she does slightly worse on than the previous quiz. She claims that she is greatly confused by the math, but doesn't come to section/office hours, and fails the first exam.
One student accuses another student of cheating after the final exam. It is unclear exactly how the cheating occurred from her statement, but after analyzing the exams of that student, the accuser, and a girl sitting in between them, you realize all three have a statistically impossible percentage of answers in common (90% of wrong answers wrong in the same way on a multiple-choice final).
After the final exam is completed, one of proctoring GSIs note he thought two students were chatting with one another. Their GSI said they are good friends and frequently work together in section. Both students had the same version of the exam (even though four versions of the exam were randomly shuffled). One student got 15 questions wrong, the other 16. Of those incorrect answers, 13 of them were on the same question, and 12 of those had the same “wrong” answer. They are brought in to chat with the professor and head GSI, and they deny cheating. The professor continues to grill them over and over again, but they deny it. The Head GSI even calculates the probabilities that this occurrence was “by chance”, showing that the chances they would guess the same wrong answer on 12 questions is VERY IMPROBABLE. The professor dismisses the students, but they continue to argue they did not cheat. The professor allows them to re-take the final exam. They end up getting similar scores (within a few points), both do better on the second final exam than they did on the first one, but there is no correlation between their incorrect answers.