[ridv]

Former TA here. I saw this happen several times with foreign students and domestic students. Maybe I could shed a little light on why this is this the case in most universities (mine was a public one in a large state for what it's worth).

Failing someone on the grounds of cheating at the university where I attended was a huge time investment. If the student contested their failing grade, the professor/lecturer who was the accuser had to go with evidence and present it before an internal panel. The student would obviously be allowed to defend themselves.

The outcome of the panel would rarely be in the favor of the accuser and against the student. The student would have to have been accused multiple times before the panel would take the complaint seriously. The punishment would end up being something like turning the failing grade into just one grade above failing.

When you consider how much a lecture gets paid, and how little importance teaching is given for researchers, you begin to understand why lecturers/professors just hand out Ds and move on with their lives.

The amount of times I caught people with MOSS[1] was too damn high. Never had anything come out of it so I stopped going the extra mile past sending the results to the person teaching the course.

[1] https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/

[pnw_hazor]

My daughter has been TAing for undergrad intro-to-programming courses at her university (she is ugrad too). Her heart was broken more than once when she discovered how blatantly people she otherwise liked a lot would cheat.

Initially it posed quite a dilemma for her since she had the power to give zeros for cheating, we determined the best course of action is to forward the evidence to the professor and forget about it.