Nine students at Yale University were given one-semester suspensions last week after they were found guilty of cheating on a take-home final exam in a physics course last spring.

A total of 13 students in an introductory physics course were investigated for cheating after the course instructor, Assistant Professor Dieter Meschede, discovered that their exams contained similar answers.

"Nine students were suspended for one term with automatic readmission, one student was put on probation for the rest of his/her terms at Yale, and for three students these charges [of cheating] were dropped," according to a statement released by Edward Carew, chairman of the school's disciplinary committee, the Yale Executive Committee.

Meschede first suspected that students had collaborated on the exams after he noticed that two of the exam books contained very similar answers, said Edward Hines, Yale's Director of Undergraduate Studies.

Meschede notified Hines of the unusual similarity of the answers on the two exams, and the two compiled an additional 11 exams, that seemed to contain evidence of cheating, Hines said. Most of the 13 exams had "overwhelming similarities" in their answers, he said.

The cheating accusations were controversial on the Yale campus because Meschede had allowed students to work together on all problem sets and even on a take-home midterm exam, said Bruce Spiza, a former government representative who has taken an active role in the cheating case.

In addition, the punishments come a year after the Yale student government wrote a report criticizing the process by which the disciplinary committee operates and the extreme confidentiality surrounding the cases, Spiza said.

Some students said they think that, given Meschede's liberal teaching practices, the students should not have been suspended, even though the final contained explicit instructions for students not to work together.

"The general student sentiment was that they were punished too severely, and the process was unfair," said Alexander Mishkin, acting chairman for the government committee in the Yale student government.

But Hines said he thought that the punishments were not as harsh as they could have been and that "the Executive Committee wanted to show some mitigation towards the students without giving the message that cheating was okay."

The standard punishment for cheating is suspension for a full year, Hines said.

Carew and the other two members of the committee, Associate Dean of Yale Patricia Pierce and Committee Factfinder Sidney Clark, declined all comment beyond Carew's official statement. Meschede also refused comment.

All nine of the students suspended were seniors who took the course in order to fulfill a pre-med requirement, Mishkin said. The suspended students severely damaged their chances for gaining acceptance into a medical school, he said.

Meschede offered to write a letter to the committee in behalf of the students after the punishments were announced, Spiza said. However, the disciplinary committee's rules allow guilty students to appeal their sentence, but not the verdict against them.

"It's a strange case in that apparently a lot of people were collaborating and didn't think that they were cheating," Spiza said.