What is going on with these students?

[Caracal]

The situation gets weirder. It turns out that Wi Wi's email is "Zhangwei@[ouruniversity]."

Plus when I look up their transcripts, they have taken identical courses for their entire university career. The exact same courses as each other, every term for several years. But they do not have the same grades.

Maybe they are conjoined twins.

That is strange. I had a group of five visiting Japanese students take one of my classes last Fall. Their language skills varied and I think they wanted to be able to study together and use each other's help to make sure they could follow things. I could sometimes tell on the essay exams that they were studying together and sharing notes, but there was nothing dishonest going on. That was an intro class, however, for visiting students. Taking all of the exact same courses as another student seems very strange...

[polly_mer]

The situation gets weirder. It turns out that Wi Wi's email is "Zhangwei@[ouruniversity]."

Plus when I look up their transcripts, they have taken identical courses for their entire university career. The exact same courses as each other, every term for several years. But they do not have the same grades.

Maybe they are conjoined twins.

What's their major? 

It would not be weird to take all the same courses in a program with few to no electives like engineering or nursing where the electives are mostly technical ones in the last three semesters.  Even the gen ed 'electives' will be whatever fits into the term's remaining time slots after the required courses that tend to only have one section are scheduled and are marked on the program schedule as 'humanities that also count for diversity/globalization/group 4'.  Again, this may only be three courses total as gen ed 'electives'.

At one point in undergrad in chemical engineering, we students joked that we should just get to stay put in the classroom and the next professor could arrive since we had nearly 100% student overlap between five courses that term.

[Hegemony]

Their major is not one with few electives, like nursing or engineering. They both have plenty of electives on their transcripts. (The same ones.)

I asked them how they know the other one. Both said that they "were friends back at the university."

Now both of them have misunderstood the same assignment. The assignment was to pick one example from article A and one example from article B, and compare them. Both students picked two examples from article A. (They did not pick the same same two examples.) No other students made this mistake.  One student turned in the assignment at 5:32. The other turned in the assignment at 5:34. 

Their total time spent on the class site has now increased, but is still identical.

I have a call in to our office of student problems to consult about all this.

[jerseyjay]

When I was director of online education, I investigated an oddity case where a student had a consistent voice in any one course, but had no consistency in voice between courses.  I had access to the IP logs and this name was logging in from a variety of geographic locales.  The locales were all within the continental United States and I didn't find a smoking gun (e.g., 9 AM log in from Denver for course A, 10 AM log in from Anchorage for course B), but it was really weird.  We wanted to believe being a truck driver or a frequent business traveler, but the getting-to-know-you posts didn't indicate that kind of background.

Were the logins consistent (e.g., course A always from Denver and course B always from Anchorage) or random? I have a VPN on my computer, and I have it set to go through the nearest location available (which is usually in the tristate area I am located in) but I could also change it to other states or other countries, and I believe there is also a random feature. Sometimes it routes me through an IP in Britain or Canada, for reasons I don't really follow.

A previous job I had required we use their VPN, which was alternatively in a Mid-Atlantic state or Texas.

[Puget]

Their major is not one with few electives, like nursing or engineering. They both have plenty of electives on their transcripts. (The same ones.)

I asked them how they know the other one. Both said that they "were friends back at the university."

Now both of them have misunderstood the same assignment. The assignment was to pick one example from article A and one example from article B, and compare them. Both students picked two examples from article A. (They did not pick the same same two examples.) No other students made this mistake.  One student turned in the assignment at 5:32. The other turned in the assignment at 5:34. 

Their total time spent on the class site has now increased, but is still identical.

I have a call in to our office of student problems to consult about all this.

I would say the simplest explanation is probably the right one here, as you suspect-- one of them is doing all or most of the work for the other one, and has been all along (presumably for $$)-- that student is logged in to two accounts at the same time, and submitting two versions of everything. It will be interesting to see what happens when both students have to show up for their student conduct talking-to.

[Caracal]

Their major is not one with few electives, like nursing or engineering. They both have plenty of electives on their transcripts. (The same ones.)

I asked them how they know the other one. Both said that they "were friends back at the university."

Now both of them have misunderstood the same assignment. The assignment was to pick one example from article A and one example from article B, and compare them. Both students picked two examples from article A. (They did not pick the same same two examples.) No other students made this mistake.  One student turned in the assignment at 5:32. The other turned in the assignment at 5:34. 

Their total time spent on the class site has now increased, but is still identical.

I have a call in to our office of student problems to consult about all this.

If it wasn't for the weirdness with the names, I would assume they are just working together on the class a lot. It makes sense, for example, that if one or both of them don't have great language skills, they might discuss the assignment and one of them misunderstood and passed that misunderstanding to the other. They might just be actually sitting down and writing the things while talking to each other? Whether that's cheating or not sort of depends on how extensive the collaboration is.

In some ways that would make more sense based on the timing than if one student was doing the other student's work. If that was the case, why would they submit them both at the same time, and why would they be spending the same amount of time on the course? Would the one student have the other student logged in at the same time on a different device? And why would you do that in the first place?

But the name part is pretty weird.

[polly_mer]

When I was director of online education, I investigated an oddity case where a student had a consistent voice in any one course, but had no consistency in voice between courses.  I had access to the IP logs and this name was logging in from a variety of geographic locales.  The locales were all within the continental United States and I didn't find a smoking gun (e.g., 9 AM log in from Denver for course A, 10 AM log in from Anchorage for course B), but it was really weird.  We wanted to believe being a truck driver or a frequent business traveler, but the getting-to-know-you posts didn't indicate that kind of background.

Were the logins consistent (e.g., course A always from Denver and course B always from Anchorage) or random? I have a VPN on my computer, and I have it set to go through the nearest location available (which is usually in the tristate area I am located in) but I could also change it to other states or other countries, and I believe there is also a random feature. Sometimes it routes me through an IP in Britain or Canada, for reasons I don't really follow.

A previous job I had required we use their VPN, which was alternatively in a Mid-Atlantic state or Texas.

It wasn't consistent per course nor was it completely random.  There were patterns across days that follow main interstates linked to major airports (e.g., Tuesday morning, Denver.  Wednesday morning, Kansas City.  Thursday afternoon, Minneapolis.  Saturday, Atlanta.  Monday afternoon, Miami), but it wasn't a weekly or monthly repeated route.

However, the personal reflections never mentioned travel and, while this student was enrolled in two courses per 8-week term as officially full-time, I can't remember an example of logging into both courses from the same place within minutes of each other.  SPADFMe, but when I travel a lot, I clump my logins to do a couple hours at the hotel every day instead of alternating days.  That has been especially true for projects that each have due dates multiple times through the week.

The other weird part was inconsistency in voice between classes.  For example, the essays for an English class were standard English as good as mine.  However, the discussion posts in math class were more consistent with Chinese fluency with English as a second language.  The email exchanges were colloquial English that I associate with an inadequate high school education and a lack of much writing thereafter.

Thus, while the IP addresses alone might have been a VPN issue, the IT director didn't suggest that as a high probability in this case.

[brixton]

The situation gets weirder. It turns out that Wi Wi's email is "Zhangwei@[ouruniversity]."

Plus when I look up their transcripts, they have taken identical courses for their entire university career. The exact same courses as each other, every term for several years. But they do not have the same grades.

Maybe they are conjoined twins.

What is Zhangwei's email?   If it is the same, then you have your answer.   If it isn't, then something else is going on. 

A little lesson in Chinese names:  Zhang is likely the person's surname.   Wei is likely their given name.   It is not unusual for a Chinese person to double their given name.  It is very unusual to double their surname.   (Teaching in China, I know many Fei feis or Xu xus:  Their actual given name is Fei or Xu.)  Thus some one who's given name is Wei might use the nickname Wei wei or Wi wi (keep in mind the pinyan -- romanization of names can create discrepancies). 

But, it seems that your university wouldn't assign the same person two different email.  So I would ask each for their university email and go from there.

[Hegemony]

Their email addresses are listed by the system. One's email is Zhangwei@[ouruniversity], the other's is Zhangw@[ouruniversity].

If, in the name "Zhangwei," Zhang is the surname and Wei is the forename, what is the Chen? (The complete name is Zhangwei Chen.)

One aspect that leads me to suspect that something nefarious is going on is that they both insist they haven't seen each other since the spring. Maybe they're just in contact by phone or computer, but the immediate denials lead me to suspect that they want to quell suspicion. I don't think they know that I can see their submission and posting times, and total time on Canvas. I'm not going to let on about that aspect.

I did notice that first one of them takes the exam, and gets a poor score, and then the other takes the exam, and gets an excellent score. However, the questions are mostly different, so I'm not quite sure how that's working. I have a huge question bank and the system randomly picks questions. So sometimes the questions happen to overlap, but usually not. I'll have to plot out what happens to the ones that do.

[Caracal]

One aspect that leads me to suspect that something nefarious is going on is that they both insist they haven't seen each other since the spring. Maybe they're just in contact by phone or computer, but the immediate denials lead me to suspect that they want to quell suspicion. I don't think they know that I can see their submission and posting times, and total time on Canvas. I'm not going to let on about that aspect.

Hmm, yes. That would be a weird reaction from students who just were studying together and communicating a lot about the class. The identical times on Canvas are suspicious, but it also doesn't really make that much sense to me. I'm trying to imagine why that would be happening. If one of the students was doing all the work for the other student, would they really be logging in at the same time to both accounts, writing up the assignments and then submitting them at almost the same time?

It makes me wonder if there's some person sitting in a cubicle somewhere who has a set of operating instructions for how they are supposed to submit these things and interact with the CMS.

[Hibush]

It makes me wonder if there's some person sitting in a cubicle somewhere who has a set of operating instructions for how they are supposed to submit these things and interact with the CMS.

What about an AI bot or two? Not even in a cubicle. How can you test whether it is one of the more advanced pieces of software rather than one person behind both identities?

[Caracal]

It makes me wonder if there's some person sitting in a cubicle somewhere who has a set of operating instructions for how they are supposed to submit these things and interact with the CMS.

What about an AI bot or two? Not even in a cubicle. How can you test whether it is one of the more advanced pieces of software rather than one person behind both identities?

The bot isn't writing the assignments though.

[Hegemony]

Aha!  By chance something more suspicious has revealed itself.

The exams are set to take questions from a large exam bank, but by chance the system gave the students six of the same questions.

Student A takes the exam from 9:02-9:20 and gets all of the six questions wrong. The system tags wrong answers after the exam is finished.  Because I set up this one exam wrong, the system also indicated the correct answers after the exam was finished.

Student B takes the exam from 9:24-9:40 and gets all of those six questions correct.

I talked to our office that handles cheating, but unfortunately their setup doesn't really take this kind of thing into account. Their process is to contact students and ask if they've been cheating.  Well, I think we can't expect the answer "Yes, actually I've been doing all the work for this other student."  I suggested that the office do a more extensive investigation, for instance figuring out if they'd been submitting via the same computer. The person was nonplussed. I don't think they've gotten their minds around electronic cheating before.

My idea was that the office should contact their previous instructors and ask if both students came to class, or if only one ever showed up. They didn't want to do this, for a reason they couldn't articulate. "Wasn't appropriate."  Hmph.

[the_geneticist]

Aha!  By chance something more suspicious has revealed itself.

The exams are set to take questions from a large exam bank, but by chance the system gave the students six of the same questions.

Student A takes the exam from 9:02-9:20 and gets all of the six questions wrong. The system tags wrong answers after the exam is finished.  Because I set up this one exam wrong, the system also indicated the correct answers after the exam was finished.

Student B takes the exam from 9:24-9:40 and gets all of those six questions correct.

I talked to our office that handles cheating, but unfortunately their setup doesn't really take this kind of thing into account. Their process is to contact students and ask if they've been cheating.  Well, I think we can't expect the answer "Yes, actually I've been doing all the work for this other student."  I suggested that the office do a more extensive investigation, for instance figuring out if they'd been submitting via the same computer. The person was nonplussed. I don't think they've gotten their minds around electronic cheating before.

My idea was that the office should contact their previous instructors and ask if both students came to class, or if only one ever showed up. They didn't want to do this, for a reason they couldn't articulate. "Wasn't appropriate."  Hmph.

If the first student shared the exam answers with the second student, that's academic misconduct, regardless of how you set up the exam.  You can ask the second student to explain WHY they chose those answers.  Or ask the first student if they shared the answers with anyone.  They might just say yes.  Some students think that if they saw the answers, then it's OK to share.

[marshwiggle]

My idea was that the office should contact their previous instructors and ask if both students came to class, or if only one ever showed up. They didn't want to do this, for a reason they couldn't articulate. "Wasn't appropriate."  Hmph.

I have to say, going through this after the fact, even from previous term(s?), is a bit concerning. Proving innocence is also more difficult the more time has passed.