system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
How much cheating should be "tolerated?"

I'm a graduate student at a top institution (top 10 in US), and have been painfully honest my entire student life. Somehow I convinced myself that others shared this sentiment, but this last year has shaken me down to reality, especially now that I'm grading as a teaching assistant.  


I feel great pain for the honest students; I'm grading a final right now, and I realize that they cannot always compete with a group of five or six taking the final as a group. My proof is "slim," but those of you that grade understand what I'm saying---it's obvious when someone is cheating, especially when rare mistakes occur repeatedly in batches. Not only that; I heard in the background of one student's audio PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT SOMETHING RESEMBLING THE EXAM just before I distributed it. I want to believe that the students are honest, but this is ignorant of the evidence in front of me.  


To those with more experience, when and where do you draw the line, and how do you respond? I cannot just ignore a grading rubric, but I cannot see the point of grading this exam and assigning students a totally meaningless grade.
gpt
Ideally, all cheating should be dealt with. But in reality it is only worth pursuing if there is clear, demonstrable, uncontrovertable evidence. Pursuing hunches or suspicions gets nowhere if you can't find that evidence, and if you sink your time into chasing down every suspected infraction you will never get anything else done.

There are huge issues with this year in particular, as the tools simply have not been in place to police the remote assignments we have been forced in to running. However, a well designed assessment can make this kind of cheating much harder, and a well designed mark scheme can give leeway for penalties in terms of referencing, structure,  and originality. You can design-away so much of the problem that all cases either become marginal/irrelevant, or so completely obvious that dealing with it is relatively straight forward.