What to do if a student claims to have turned in the homework but I could not find it? I am teaching a course in a college and assignment homework on a regular basis. Usually I collect all homework in the class and later my student secretary grades all the homework and return them to the students through the mail room. If a student did not turn in the homework at all, a zero will be given.

There is a student who claims to have turned in two homework but got zero for both. I am checking with my secretary and is awaiting for his reply. Likely he will tell me that he does remember anything about her homework. Also I have asked the student to check her mailbox, and it is quite likely that she could not find her homework there. 

Another piece of information: I suspect the student is dishonest as sometimes her quiz answer is identical to the student sitting next to her. But since I never caught her red-handed, this should not be used as an evidence.

Now assuming that no evidence can be found regarding whether she turned the homework or not, there are at least three opinions for me:


Give her full marks for the homework, assuming that it is I or my secretary who misplaced them.
Give her zeros, ignoring her claims.
As a happy medium, change her homework status as "excused" so these two particular homework will not be counted toward her grade.


I have done Option 1 in the past, but only to find out later that the student who made the claim turns out to be a very dishonest student and likely she lied to me and benefited from lying. What would you suggest me to do in this situation?
Since you have no way to show that the student didn't submit the homework, it's simply your word against the word of the student.  Furthermore, there were lots of homework assignments from various students, so it would presumably be easier for you to forget receiving the homework than it would be for the student to mistakenly remember submitting the homework.  

If an unbiased third party considered this and assumed honesty from both sides, I think that they would conclude that it was more likely that you had lost/forgotten the paper than that the student had remembered submitting a paper when she, in fact, had not done so. 

If this happened with a student taking a class from a TA or faculty member under my supervision, I'd tell the TA or faculty member to "excuse the grade" and adopt a system for homework submission (e.g. use a learning management system) that provides independent confirmation that the homework was submitted.