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    Having a different message to the one in the code, plus writing to the database after the connection has failed... that's pretty strong evidence. Commented Apr 28, 2009 at 14:40
  • That's circumstantial evidence at best, although hir story is rather fishy. Commented Apr 28, 2009 at 14:48
  • In an application that doesn't properly log its errors, I wouldn't be surprised if the code egon0119 is looking at is not the code that's handling the student's submission. Starting from "wrong server" over "deployed wrong version" to "looked in wrong directory". For me, that's as fishy as the student's story and -- having worked a few years at a student's IT helpdesk -- I'm extra careful every time expulsion comes up. "In dubio pro reo" as I said, and I see much "dubio" here. Commented Apr 28, 2009 at 16:50
  • You're entirely right. That thought had occurred to us. This is very serious and we've spent a lot of time and effort making sure it's nothing as simple as the wrong server or the wrong directory. There's only one production web server and I've gone so far as have the entire server grep-ed, not just the web root. So far this system has processed over 800,000 essay submissions and this student is the only one to have error text stored in the DB. (Records are only appended to, never deleted.) Commented Apr 28, 2009 at 18:32
  • Additionally, we are having the student submitting his assignments by email. None of my programmers nor the teaching staff have yet been able to duplicate the error when submitting his work into the web site. Commented Apr 28, 2009 at 19:01