My wife stopped me and we just went to talk to the teacher. He said that he knew about my son di dnot copy answer from others but the rule apply to everyone involved in the cheating. He further said he gave my son a second chance as long as he wrote an apolozing note. My son wrote something like " it is the teacher's fault that other kids could not do the test". He wrote that"he is doing the teacher a favor to show other kids the right answers". That was why teacher got upset and gave him a 0 on the test.
We of course apologize first and made sure we will get our son to understand his mistake. Then we showed the teacher that my son has never got a B before and it is important to us that he could maintain that straight A.
because we were nice and none confrontational, the teacher worked with us. He change my son's grade to 59, still an F as the rule required. However, with other test scores and his home work, my son still got his A as the average.
The lesson here - understand if your kid is at fault or not. If he/she broke the law/rule, it really does not matter how big or small. It like if a cop pull you over for drive 66 MPH on a 65MPH zone. You will still have to pay a fine.
If your kid made mistake, the #1 thing is to make sure he/she understand what is the problem so it will not happen next time. After that, I will deal with school with politeness. School does not want to have a record that they have any student that was suspended for a semester. If you go with force first, they may response with force. Unless they are >51% at fault, you can't win with force.
Just my $0.02