James, I did exactly what you suggested. Every single student came to protest. I believed that things would play out exactly as you are thinking. Unfortunately, they turned out very differently.
Students hear that peers are getting sent straight to the honor board, and they fall in line. The next assignment that rolls around, almost surely less students will attempt to cheat. If you have to spend Y hours sending more students to the honor board, hopefully Y is less than X. But it sends a loud-and-clear, unmistakable message to the students that cheating is unacceptable. With any luck the students that actually take the class seriously will appreciate your candor on the matter.
I agree that allowing students to actually come in and argue their case to you is a waste of your time. You're right, that's not your job. Send it to the honor board and waste the time of the deans and the department heads, since that's their job. If you let students waste your time by giving them an extra strike before they're out, you can't be surprised when they try to take advantage of it. One strike and you're out tells students that it doesn't matter if ex post facto you think your best friend's grandma's death drove you to do it: cheating is never acceptable.
Think about it in terms of incentives and scarce resources. If the students know they can come and protest to you with no additional consequences, they will certainly do so, guilty or no. Everyone has heard the story of merciful teachers and cops that don't give a ticket if you cry. At worst, they are out two hours, and at best, they may get a higher grade with very little work. Basically, your time has become a commons whose use has no real cost to the individuals taking advantage of it, but from which they believe some value can be extracted.
The economic solution is to make sure the time costs something, so that the students will consider whether there's really enough utility in protesting to make it worth the cost. The cost is that if they protest, they run the risk of suspension in the event they are actually guilty. It should be obvious to students that this will be the likely outcome if they do protest.
Let me know if I'm reading you wrong because I really am curious if students protested even though any protest would result in an immediate referral to the honor board. Also, thanks for fighting the good fight even though it got you screwed in the end. We need more folks like that.
Oh, I didn't mention the one other advantage this approach has. If you quickly and forcefully deal with students who have violated class policies, I think there will be less emotional "splash damage." It's the same way a parent should not draw out a punishment over a long period of time -- make it hard, get it over with, and wipe the slate clean so you can smile at each other the next day.
So I did that, notified the cheating students they got a -30 (negative the points of the homework) and directed them to the Dean's office for appeals.
Well, it was very difficult to enforce the "talk to the Dean's office if you have a problem with my judgment." When the student comes in my office during office hours, I cannot say "I do not want to talk to you, get out of my office". Yes, I could do it, in theory. Hard to do in practice. Would I physically push the student out of my office?
> Instead, I sent an email to the class. I just said that there were cases of plagiarism detected and whomever cheated, could come and find me. For the rest, I would report the case . . .
I guess I just read this as an invitation to come and discuss the matter with you. And I understood from this that any who didn't come would be referred. If I were a student and reading this paragraph, I would make damn sure to speak with you about my indiscretions. That is the exact opposite of what I'm proposing, which is that you only refer students to the dean if they do come and speak with you.
Perhaps you meant to convey something different than what I'm getting from the blog post, if so, sorry for misreading.
> When the student comes in my office during office hours . . .
Once again, I've never been a professor, although I did TA for a while when I was in college. That said, I had an expectation that my office hours would be utilized in some way or another by students. I would propose prioritizing any student that wants to ask about something other than their cheating conviction. For students who want to talk about the cheating, just say, "If you really believe you did not cheat, we can discuss the evidence. But that will only happen at an academic integrity board hearing. If they find you innocent, I will regrade your work. Think about it and let me know by email if that's what you want to do." And then just refuse to talk about it.
Again, you're the professional and I'm the backseat driver. You know more about how this works than I do. This is simply how I imagine it would go, and although you've disagreed with me several times I still haven't gotten the impression that you did what I'm proposing.
In fact, I would argue that office hours is NOT the proper venue to discuss these matters anyway. From my experience, the purpose of office hours was to clear doubts and further understanding of the class material. I would've been extremely pissed off if I came to office hours with a legitimate question about the material, only to waste my time waiting on a bunch of people arguing about cheating.
However, during office hours, any student can come in and discuss class-related topics. I cannot prevent students from entering my office, just because I believe that they will want to discuss their cheating penalty.
I understand that people will cheat and that as technology changes the game it's potentially harder to catch them and that's ultimately not your job. Does the school use character as one of the attributes when selecting students? Should they maybe be more selective? It just seems like a staggering number of cheats.
You ever collect any statistics on it? Are there certain trends?