As Part of a Required Ethics Course, Students Were Required

As part of a required ethics course, students were required to take an online 90 minute ethics final.Facing graduation and many pressures with starting new jobs and moving, the students worked together to complete the final.Since the essays were all closely worded the same, the instructor could determine that some sort of cheating on the ethics exam had taken place.Using ethical decision making model, what should the school, instructor and students do? Would the suggested solution be different if the school had an honor code?
The students used an egoism approach to rationalize cheating on the final.The school and the instructor have the dilemma of what to do.Although many would agree with punishment for the cheating, the dilemma is what is the goal/role of a school and course.As an educational institute, the goal is probably to educate the students.Is the cheating incident a failure of the students or the program? One solution that the students may not think of is that the cheating students would have to use ethical reasoning and ethical decision making model to justify the solution to the problem they caused.