Except the power imbalance: position, experience, social, etc. meant that the vast majority just took the zero and never complained or challenged the prof. Sounds like your typical out-of-touch academic who thought they were super clever.
It's an incredible abuse of power to intentionally mark innocent students' answers wrong when they're correct. Just to solve your own problem, that you may very well be responsible for.
Knowing the way a lot of professors act, I'm not surprised, but it's always disheartening to see how many behave like petty tyrants who are happy to throw around their power over the young.
If you cheat, you should get a zero. How is this controversial.
Since high school, the expectation is that you show your work. I remember my high school calculus teacher didn't even LOOK at the final answer - only the work.
The nice thing was that if you made a trivial mistake, like adding 2 + 2 = 5, you got 95% of the credit. It worked out to be massively beneficial for students.
The same thing continued in programming classes. We wrote our programs on paper. The teacher didn't compile anything. They didn't care much if you missed a semicolon, or called a library function by a wrong name. They cared if the overall structure and algorithms were correct. It was all analyzed statically.
I understand both that this is valuable AND how many (most?) education environments are (supposed) to work, but 2 interesting things can happen with the best & brightest:
1. they skip what are to them the obvious steps (we all do as we achieve mastery) and then get penalized for not showing their work.
2. they inherently know and understand the task abut not the mechanized minutia. Think of learning a new language. A diligent student can work through the problem and complete an a->b translation, then go the other way, and repeat. Someone with mastery doesn't do this; they think within one language and then only pass the contextual meaning back and forth when explicitly required.
"showing your work" is really the same thing as "explain how you think" and may be great for basics in learning, but also faces levels of abstraction as you ascend towards mastery.
It's like with the justice system: if you have to choose between the risk of jailing an innocent and the risk letting a guilty person go free, you choose to let a guilty person go free. All the time.
Unless you're 100% sure that a student cheated, you don't punish them. And you don't ask them to prove they're innocent.
