Pardon me but I need to go throw up now.

I found a student paper that is very very likely plagiarised from an earlier semester's paper. I have no concrete way to PROVE it (I don't keep copies of old papers - but this semester, I am going to start NOT handing the papers back, telling the students I need to hang on to them).

I tried e-mailing the student that may have been copied off, but if she's complicit in it I'm willing to bet she doesn't send me the paper.

I don't have quite enough bravado to do what my dad once did - when one of his TAs said, "I know two people are cheating on a test but I don't have clear enough proof to yank their tests out of their hands" - he announced the next day that he had "evidence" of cheating, and that if the cheaters came forward, all they would get would be a 0, but if they didn't, he would refer the case to the campus Honor Board. (That last bit was pure bravado, but he banked (correctly) on it working)

The next day, 12 students came in to confess to cheating. (Including the 2 that actually were suspected).

I don't know. Part of me says I'm getting too old for this - to have my few lasting scraps of idealism about humanity battered every semester, to have to play cop, to have to do more and more "lawyerballing" to prevent crap like this.

I know I DON'T want to be "that prof" - the one who turns a blind eye to cheating. But the amount of effort it takes to prevent cheating - well, it's like an evolutionary arms race: you figure something out, they figure something out to defeat that tactic.

I know it's letting the lazy people win to STOP doing a research project all together, but some days I'm seriously tempted.