Moral Dilemma - Rat on a co-student or not?

[Arito]

Imagine the following situation if you will.

I have finished my Master's thesis on something I am passionate about. Because the faculty staff was short on personell, they asked me to work with another student in a team on it. I accepted this offer, although I knew I would be doing most of the work. So it happened. I did about 95% of the work, but I didn't really mind. Papers are a specialty of mines and I'm a control freak anyway, I like to monitor the quality of anything that has my name on it. Besides, like I said, the subject of the paper really is much more in my area of expertise than that of my co-student.

So everything went along fine. I went to most of the meetings with my supervisor alone because the supervisor was only at the university one day a week and my co-student had to work that day. The only thing that needed to be done was the final presentation of the thesis. We couldn't do it together because he wasn't done with all his courses yet. So I did it by myself, and he would do it by himself later on.

Now, after my presentation and about half an hour of questions the supervisor and co-reader say to me:

"We know you did all of the work. This thesis is good enough for one person but is not good enough to graduate two people. Because we know you did all the work, we are giving you the option of telling us you did all the work and erasing the name of the co-student from the paper. If you do not do this, you will both fail and have to make another paper or do a lot more work on this one"

This final session usually is just a formality. You can only fail if you royally screw it up and even then only because of something big like plagiarism. The thesis is pretty much okay'd before the session starts, otherwise they would have said to change something. My diploma is right there, all they need to do is sign it and give it to me. Because of this I'm about 50/50 on whether they're bluffing on the whole "you fail if you dont rat him out"-thing.

If I do rat him out, the co-student has to write a thesis on his own and possibly have some kind of penalty (although I highly doubt this). The co-student is not a friend of mines, but a nice guy nonetheless. I have no plans of ever seeing him after graduation.

I have three options as I see it:

1. Tell them they're wrong, we split the work 50/50.

2. Tell them they're right, but you accepted the division of responsibilities and that it's not fair to fail one of you. You both pass, or you both fail.

3. Tell them they're right, he really didn't do anything so he can't object too much to getting his name erased from the paper.