To sum up: The real cheater here is the instructor. You obviously get an enemy if you go against him - we cannot judge the power structure in your department and whether reporting the situation will in any form help. Do your best and teach another's instructor course next year.

Maybe I'm confused having come from a different background, but students using the solution manual at home doesn't sound like cheating to me. Homework is done with full access to whatever resources you want: if your homework problems can be solved by simply coping out of a book then that's the issue, not the students' behaviour.

I agree with @CharlieB. You can scare a student by threatening punishments and enforcing those; but when a student cheats, you (and ideally the professor) should reflect on why the student was even able to cheat (e.g. by using textbook questions).

Did you have evidence of cheating (ok, plagiarism from a textbook solution) when you first pointed out the (potential for) cheating in September? Is it possible the new instructor was naive enough to think it wouldn’t actually be a problem?

"Confronting" a superior is an extremely bad move, professionally speaking. You're probably too low down the food chain to survive them badmouthing you to their peers.

Related: academia.stackexchange.com/questions/84576/…

@CharlieB: I don't agree; you are effectively saying that if the homework problems can be solved by simply getting your parents to do it all for you, then your parents doing it all for you is the issue, not your behaviour. That really is silly. Students copying out of a book is part of their behaviour, so how can you say that it's not their behaviour?

I know professors, which do not care about cheating in homework, because they think who cheats himself into the exam either will learn the stuff before the exam or just cheats himself into failing the exam. I understand the perspective, but I see your problem, when there are really such strict guidelines and not every professor may have his own view on the issue but they need to follow the strict guidelines. But it may still help to ask the professor for the reasons for his view to understand it and then start a discussion about the problems.

@user21820 I agree that students copying from a book is their behaviour: my point is that I see no problem with this behaviour. Homework is "open-book" so I'd expect students to research widely while tackling it. When setting questions you should assume that students have access to the literature: your questions shouldn't be answerable by literally copying from a book otherwise they're not properly testing understanding.

@user21820 I don't agree that this is equivalent to getting someone else to do your work for you: that is cheating, since it doesn't advance your own understanding. Reading books on the subject—particularly course books—is research, not cheating.

@CharlieB: The question here explicitly states that the full solution is online. Students obviously don't have to understand a thing to be able to copy it. This question has nothing to do with reading course books.

@user21820 usually a "solution manual" is a publication that accompanies the course book: in my university students were required to purchase this along with the course book itself, because worked examples are a key part of learning. I think that setting problem sheets with publicly available answers and then being surprised that students use them is a bit silly.

@CharlieB: Okay I don't think we actually disagree much. I interpreted the question to be saying that the solution manual was not handed out by the instructor but is easily found online. In that case, students who intentionally read the solution manual and copy from them are definitely cheating. If the instructor told students to buy a book, which has an official solution manual, then indeed I agree it is just silly to set graded assignments from that book.

@user21820 True; if it's a bootlegged copy of guidance which was meant for TAs but at some point got scanned and uploaded to BitTorrent then I agree, that's cheating.

@user21820 The point is that you cannot really control cheating on homework: so either you give homework and you don't count it (this is my policy: homework is just informative) or you give complex, open-book homework, where any kind of resource can be used and cheating doesn't give enough advantage.

@MassimoOrtolano: I totally agreed with your policy. Another way is to have a compulsory presentation component to graded homework, so that you can assess whether the student really knows what is going on or not. But even complex open-book homework does not really prevent cheating; as you know there are some people who have nothing better to do than to provide full solutions to any question posted online that they can answer.

@virmaior Hello. Thanks for pointing these out, I appreciate it. I have removed some less important information from the post, and have also updated my general location: North america very large university (about 60,000 undergrad). Please don't hesitate to give more comments.

@user21820, CharlieB: Most undergraduate publishers that I see now have answers to odd-numbered problems in the textbook, and a separate full-solutions manual marked "For Instructors Only" (usually restricted by a special account login on the publisher's website). If that latter work is obtained and used by students, do you consider it cheating, or not?

It seems odd that the university's "extremely strict policy against cheating" has "failed" so badly that "cheating is extremely blatant".

@GoodDeeds Actually, quite the opposite. Cheating first became blatant, with various "institutions and organizations" posting advertisement on buying HW solutions everywhere on campus. Then the school started to crack down on cheating in the recent 2-3 years. But the focus is on students who have been caught cheating, not these "institutions". (I guess it's difficult to take action against them.) The "institutions" have only grown much in size over the years, as more and more students start buying solutions...