At what point does collaboration become cheating?

When it breaks the rules of conduct.

If people are working on a project together, of course there are going to be similarities in content.

Helpful collaboration would be when they work together on something but still use their own thoughts and words in their assignments. Sure their ideas may be really similar, but they shouldn’t be copying or writing what the other person does word-for-word. There should still be some independence to their work.

If it is clear that all participants understand the underlying concepts and are able to reformulate them in their own words, everyone is certainly learning. If any student has to rely upon another student’s (or author’s) words, then there can be legitimate doubt that learning has taken place.

Well, by what you’ve said, when they turn in work other than their own and take credit for it as though it was, it becomes cheating. Collaboration can easily avoid the appearance of cheating by simply exploring differing conclusions or alternative reasoning towards the same conclusion from their combined source effort. If they follow the same reasoning and conclusions then both names should be on a single shared paper. Similarity of ideas can be natural in collaboration and even without it, so I’d shy away from using that as a solid indicator. Specific phrasing could be ok so long as they’re giving credit to the source.

I’m a firm believer that when collaboration is allowed, the students should turn in one multi-part presentation, but with distinct assigned parts. As an example, a presentation on the flora and fauna of Colorado, one person gets the flora, the other gets the fauna. both do bibliographies for their half, but the presentation is one effort, with both participating.

When it interfers with learning

I would expect a lot of duplication in a collaborative project. I don’t see how it can be called cheating when collaboration is exactly what is called for. If Joe and I did the work together and wrote our findings up together and we both turned them in, I would think a teacher had changed the rules on me if any fault was found with that. Under those rules, what’s to stop a whole class from collaborating and turning in one project (or many copies of the same project)? If a teacher wants to know who did what, assignments have to be individual and not collective, don’t you think?

@Jeruba: I’m talking about something a little more nuanced than that—something that is not intended to be a collaboration, but a limited amount of discussion is reasonable and expected.

In your previous details, you mentioned that their phraseology was exactly the same in specific instances and right down to repitition of the same errors.

That’s clearly more than just collaboration, right? I assume you can pull out or highlight the specific examples.

Or are you speaking in more general terms and not the specific instance in the question?

Exact same sentences.

@nikipedia, in that case I think the answer must be in whatever guidance the teacher gave on how the assignment was to be done. If the work submitted is within the guidelines, then it is legitimate. It’s up to the teacher to be clear about expectations and standards. A somewhat collaborative project sounds dangerously ambiguous to me.

Personally, I take a dim view of collaborative projects because slackers get free rides while at the same time pulling down the grades of the hard workers. And I am also a bit touchy about teachers’ changing the rules after the work is done since it happened to me three times in the past semester.