My teacher thinks I cheated on a test by looking at my neighbor's?
This answer is about an incident when I was the teacher in this situation. Fortunately, I never accused a student of anything unless I had absolute proof. All of the answers of two students who sat next to each other during a multiple-choice test were identical. After discovering it, I quietly told the two that all of their answers were identical, and I needed to ask them about it in the hallway just outside of the classroom. Just then, one got called to the office for an unrelated reason, and the class period ended before he returned. The next day, one of the two students handed me an angry parent note reprimanding me for accusing their innocent student of cheating, and informed me that the two boys had studied together. Actually, I hadnt made any accusations beyond remarking that all of the answers on their tests were identical. Once again, I invited the two boys into the hallway. Before I said a word, they adamantly claimed that they had studied together. I handed each boy his corrected test, and told them that that most of their answers should have been different since they were two different tests. Each test had all of the same questions, but not in the same order. One boy got almost 100% while the other got almost zero. The boy with the failing score looked down, and then at his buddy, and apologized for copying his test answers. The boy with the failing score was the one whose parent sent me the letter. At the beginning of class the next day, he handed me another envelope. In it was a letter of apology from the parent, and another letter of apology from the student. I never again had reason to suspect him of cheating. Now a bonus incident in which four students had identical, but incorrect answers on the whole test. This was for a shop class, and the students were tested for their ability to measure objects with a micrometer to an accuracy of 1/1000 inch. (Thats .001) None of the students sat near the other three, and all of them had proven during the school year (as much as teens can, but no insult intended) that I could trust them. I gathered the four students together, gave them their corrected tests, and told them all of their incorrect answers were identical. As each looked at the other tests, their jaws dropped, and one student gently said, Please trust me, I didnt cheat. I assured them I knew none had cheated, and explained how they had gotten their answers. Sorry, this gets a bit technical, but Ill try to keep it simple. If you look at the above picture of a micrometer scale, the thimble on the right rotates as the micrometer measures larger or smaller objects. In this picture, the number 12 on the thimble is a key to the correct reading. All four of the students made their measurements from the wrong horizontal line, and in the case of this picture, they would have used 15 on the thimble as the key to their reading. As a result, all of their answers were 3/1000 (0.003) greater than the correct measurement. None of the four students ever made that mistake again.