Accused of cheating on exam
Should I bother defending myself against a cheating allegation?
First of all, since I have little incentive to lie as an anon poster———I didn’t cheat. But maybe I should’ve been more considerate about how I’m perceived when taking online exams, and in which case, I’ll know to slow down for the sake of my professors who probably struggle to catch cheating w the growth of AI usage.
I would like to add that I’d already tried to settle it with my professor via email which didn’t work out. The question is whether or not I should bother going above him and to my uni’s misconduct department. After defending myself, my professor didn’t entertain my email reply, and only told me that he’s been teaching the class for two decades, and since nobody’s done it before, the pace that I took the exam isn’t possible without AI.
Almost two months ago, I took an exam using Smarterproctoring. My test taking was recorded but no live proctor was used, so my professor went through it himself. In short, he suspected that I cheated and immediately voided my score without telling me. I had to find out through contacting him only after this spring semester was over, and my grade (B+) was already posted.
I know! It’s not that bad, which is why I considered letting it go. But had the exam score been counted, I would’ve gotten an A-. And I feel as though I deserve it, which is why I went through the trouble of typing out a whole essay back to him.
When I emailed him last week, it was because I noticed that this exam wasn’t graded so I simply assumed it was oversight and went to remind him. That was when he said for certain that I violated student conduct, and his reasoning was:
\- I had answered all 60 exam questions correctly in under 7 minutes.
\- Some required calculations which made it extra impossible.
That sounds absolutely straightforward, except this was when I tried to defend myself by saying that I actually DIDN’T take 7 minutes, I took 28 and that was easily verifiable. The 7 minutes was me going through the exam, getting down what I knew for certain first, but the footage should’ve shown me going BACK and taking more time to reread the questions.
Also, there were certain aspects about the exam that I feel makes it absolutely possible to do quickly. First, about 50 out of 60 questions were simple 1-2 line multiple choice, basically just asking for definitions of concepts (economics) rather than applying those concepts. The other 10 were more application based—THESE were what he emphasized because they needed calculations except… I remember that the process for a lot of them could be shortcutted. This was one argument I detailed to him:
“I found some history of my midterm work in the calculator I used at the time. If it helps my case any, there is no way for me to go back and see the answers or even the questions on the midterm since they are always immediately locked after submitting, yet the numbers I will be referencing from what is saved on my calculator (TI-84 Plus CE) should still match one of the specific questions.
I’ll start with this one example, and if this isn’t sufficient, please feel free to let me know. I don’t recall which specific question number to reference, but this should belong to the question about the calculation of industry HHI. I chose this question to detail first not only because it felt most familiar to me (I have some difficulty recalling since the midterm was in March), but also because it might help explain my quickness.
I know that ideally you are supposed to work on each firm’s market share using their individual sales for the exact calculation, and this may not be a method that would have worked if the given sales numbers had been different, but to shortcut to the answer, I used the biggest firm’s sales, which was $700 (I can’t remember the individual sales of the other firms, but from the work, I saw that they added up to $3100 ← the sales were clean numbers, so I was able to mentally do the simple addition). 700/3100 = the biggest firm’s market share is 22.58%. 22.58%\^2 = about 510.
While the firms were not equally sized, for the sake of a quick estimate, I treated it as such and so I had the remaining market share of 77.5% (to get this I just did 100%-22.5%) split between the rest of the 5 firms, for 15.5%. 5 \* (15.5\^2) = about 1201. 1201 + 510 = 1711
Afterwards, I knew that the final answer couldn’t have been precisely 1711 because of these loosened estimates, so considering that, I chose whichever answer was closest to 1711.”
After emailing him back with this argument and more, he didn’t address my points and doubled down about my using AI (because 28 minutes is still short to him, even if it wasn’t 7). He didn’t bother offering to have a meeting about more of the questions. Or the work on my calculator that I still SOMEHOW have despite the exam being in March (because I did the exam!!). And it seems he didn’t bother looking at the footage again, PAST the 7 minute mark. He’s so confident that I’m intimidated to escalate it any further, thinking even the dean would share the same mindset. He also didn’t seem to report me for some reason, even when he suspects me? Also, I ended with a B+ so maybe it’s not worth it.
It just sucks. I might as well have used my time studying for that exam doing something else. I’m thinking of just accepting it because escalating might mean I might earn myself an official misconduct note on my record if they find me guilty. Plus I already have summer classes to deal with,,
Would it be wise to escalate this, or do I not have much backing at all?