A bigger picture may be; why is sending kids home for break with homework. It is my opinion, that people learn better when they actually have a break during their break. in my opinion, this is a tactic to prepare kids to think its normal to work all the time. That breaks are never actually breaks.

Leave it. Life’s hard enough, just let em have the W before the real world bursts their bubbles more.

Wait, you gave them work over their spring break? What the fuck?? Let them have a damn break!

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Of course they cheated on a take home exam. If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying.

Proctor your exams if you don’t want them to be able to utilize any of the resources at their disposal. Making them do it again in front of you sounds like bullshit imo, but I am certainly not an academic.

What does cheating mean in this context? What did they have access to that you wish they hadn’t? And if that’s the case, then why did you make this a take home exam?

First of all, school or uni?

As many others have said, don’t give a take home exam during a break, however ‘normal’ it is considered in your community.

Second, have clear guidelines on what is allowed and what is cheating. We never had take-home exams in school, and in uni every take-home exam was open book, open internet and open discussion. In the absence of any statement to the contrary, your students would also be justified in assuming so.

Asking someone to repeat the answer is fine, but it doesn’t really prove anything - they might have simply forgotten all the formulae over their break.

The best option at this point would be to cancel that question and conduct future tests during class hours, under your supervision.

Do nothing, first of all any homework is open book, no buts

Second of all it comes down to not being a dick

You do realise that even if they do cheat, since its a take home you likely won’t face any negative consequence, its just a win win in general

Nothing.
Having any homework for the holidays is already enough. Of course most of them would just want to have that gone ASAP.

I think getting them to show their work is appropriate and for any that can’t replicate their work explain to them the downfalls of cheating. The other comments here justifying likely haven’t ever been in an academic setting. Relying on cheating is setting yourself up for failure if you intend to continue studying at a tertiary level.

I don’t think a punishment is necessary for cheaters just a lecture. Let them know people can and have had their degrees rescinded years after the fact when their cheating was detected with newer methods.

Kids cheat when they’re not engaged with the material enough to learn it properly, or when the consequences for not cheating are too much for them to bear.

You gave them an assignment to do when you weren’t actually teaching them, which means there’s no way they can be properly engaged with the material. And you threatened their spring break with sitting in a room alone doing homework if they didn’t get it done fast enough. You created a perfect breeding ground for cheating. Try creating an environment where kids don’t feel that they need to cheat.

When I was in university I never heard of anyone cheating, because we were all treated like adults and we were engaging in material we liked. Try inspiring your students and treating them like adults. That means respecting their free time. If you don’t give them respect as people, you won’t get any respect as an authority.

You will probably get better answers if you ask this in a community dedicated to teaching/professors. Posting on general asklemmy seems like you’re going to get flamed a bit.

I gave my students a take home exam over spring break. (This is normal where I teach)

That is rough. Nothing you can do about it this time, but, in the future, I wouldn’t recommend giving work over break even if others are doing so. Breaks are there for a reason.

It came down to a factor of three in the solution. That factor inexplicably appeared with no justification on many of their exams.

It’s hard to say without seeing exactly what you mean, but this sounds a little flimsy. You want to be pretty sure before you accuse someone of cheating. You can always just mark the answer as wrong if they didn’t prove to you that they understand it.

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?

If I strongly suspected cheating, I would probably do something like that. Just be aware that the environment is different from a paper exam, so you need to be lenient. They are not used to standing in front of a board and working while someone watches. Also, a problem on a take-home exam could be worked on for hours, whereas you presumably expect them to do it quickly. You may need to give them the solution they wrote and see whether they can explain it to you. Or, give them most of the solution, but have them fill in some missing details that they should know if they actually did the problem.

Also, as others have said, there was no cheating unless you were very clear on what resources were allowed and not allowed on the exam.

FWIW, I do strongly disagree with the folks who are saying that any take-home exam should be open-everything. The argument that you will be able to do it in your career doesn’t hold water. School isn’t the workplace. Students are working on simple problems to build up skills that they can use to solve more complicated problems later on. If people want workplace rules about collaboration in the classroom, then the problems need to be scaled up accordingly. In many schools, that does happen later in the curriculum with things like senior projects or some project-based upper-level courses. But, teaching that way from the start wouldn’t give students the time and support they need to gradually improve, so allowed resources need to be scaled back accordingly to account for the deliberate oversimplification of the problems.

On a more personal note, sorry that you have to deal with this. Everyone can appreciate that the situation is tough for the students, but a lot of people don’t realize that dealing with cheating is also very stressful and disheartening for teachers.

I’ve seen various ways to handle it. My favorite is to grade the rest of the exam extremely harshly, where even a minor mistake could get full points taken off. Unfortunately, it’s extremely difficult to prove cheating. I’ve had students copy word-for-word from Google and that still wasn’t enough evidence. I don’t think even having the students solve it in the board could convince the higher ups to do anything

I’d ask them to come in and redo the problem on paper at the same time, if many have the answer without any calculations, the moment you got the first one in your office, the others would be aware of what’s going on.

Probably treating as “forgetting to write down their steps” before jumping to cheating; presumably you’ve been teaching them to show their work and they forgot to do that here.

Give them the chance to show you how they solved it on the board, if they can then great! Give ‘em the points and send em on their way. If not, then give them a zero for that part of the test and move on.

If the curriculum format teaches students to be test takers, I’d give them extra points for working smarter.

If my job gave me work while on my vacation, I’d be talking to the labor board if they didn’t pay me at my consultation rates.