quote:As a teacher, I could do my students a *favor* and give them all A's for all their work, no matter what the quality. They would be happy, I'm sure, but did I do them any favor by setting them an entire year behind their peers in math?
I think your whole post was well put, but this, in particular resonated with me. I think it showed the intellectual immaturity of considering this a favor, because seeing it that way suggests that teachers who give all A's are the ones being nice, and so it reveals a tendency to see teachers as adversarial when they are actually trying to help students.
Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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quote:seeing it that way suggests that teachers who give all A's are the ones being nice
Teachers who do this are trying to be nice, in much the same way that Solar was trying to do a favor. Unfortunately, as we both know, they are doing great harm, and little good beyond a simple, short-lived, artificial ego boost.
Grades are not gifts, nor are they rewards or punishments. They are the result of hard work, or lack thereof. If a student cheats, they did not work, and so they should receive no credit. Or, contrarily, they did no work you can be sure was their own, so you cannot assign credit. It's very simple.
Students who ask "why did you give me a D" are met with "I gave you nothing. You earned a D because of..."
It's why I put the word "favor" in asterisks, to call attention to the word being used improperly. It was meant to show the intellectual immaturity of considering that act a favor.
I guess that didn't come off as well as I'd thought.
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quote: I got rejected by NHS the first time I applied because I only had a few things on my list (since it was all totally honest).
That's wierd. At my school, everybody who met the GPA criteria and went through the application process (an essay, resume, and some reccomendations) got in. To stay in, you had to complete service hours etc. I don't know understand why a school would try to make the process even more selective than the national criteria states. It seems like it would just hurt the students.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Aug 2002
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I abhor copying someone else's work, and think it's practically a sin to plagiarize. I love writing papers, which many people find weird, but it's my favorite part of college. I have never copied someone else's paper, mostly because of two reasons: 1. I love writing my own. 2. I don't think any of the other students write as well as I do, so why copy substandard work?
Mostly, though, I say that in reference to my own actions. I would never copy someone else's work, and I don't ever remember letting someone copy my own. But, being honest, I did used to write papers for my brother's history and english classes. I knew he was extremely smart, just wasn't a great writer, so I did it for him. I stopped about a year ago though, when I realized he was turning 24, and he really should know the difference between "there" and "their" and that kind of thing. So I told him to write his own, but that I would gladly edit them for him. He's a much better writer now.
I learned my lesson. Cheating doesn't really help anyone. It's a crutch, and eventually, whoever is using it will have to function without it. If you are denying them to chance to learn what they need to know to walk, you really are doing them a disservice.
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As far as NHS goes, it was stupid at my high school. You had to have a certain GPA to get in, and then you were supposed to take certain honors classes and complete community service. But most everyone BSed that, and just used it to look good on their college applications. It was disgraceful.
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I would rather take home an F than cheat. Plain and simple. In junior high and high school, cheating of various levels was rampant. Even among the smart kids and the "good" kids. It repulsed me.
Icarus, what you did sounds very much like the honor system at my school (U of Michigan College of Engineering). During exams, the proctor hands out the tests, explains the rules, and then sits outside the room to answer any questions that may come up. On our exams (and sometimes homework) we are required to write:
quote: I have neither given nor received unauthorized aid on this examination, nor have I concealed any violations of the Honor Code.
If you're curious, you can find our honor code here.
I feel there is more I should say. I have very strong views concerning honesty, cheating, and the like. I'm just not very good at expressing myself. So I'll just say this: Icarus, you are absolutely in the right. Honesty and integrity should not be graded on the curve.
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quote:Originally posted by FlyingCow: Grades are not gifts, nor are they rewards or punishments. They are the result of hard work, or lack thereof. If a student cheats, they did not work, and so they should receive no credit. Or, contrarily, they did no work you can be sure was their own, so you cannot assign credit. It's very simple.
Students who ask "why did you give me a D" are met with "I gave you nothing. You earned a D because of..."
*nods vigorously* I answer similarly when a student thanks me for their grade. I tell them that I'm proud of them, but there's nothing to thank me for -- they earned it. Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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Miro, cool! That's the first time I've seen a university honor code that's currently in use and has been around longer than Caltech's.
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Well actually one is an incoming Freshman, which I think would make it impossible for you to know her. But the other is a Sophmore. Don't suppose you're in the marching band?
I'm still a little unused to the bigness of schools, Oakland University (where I go) isn't tiny, but neither is it as large as MSU or UM.
Posts: 21898 | Registered: Nov 2004
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posted
I'm also a sophmore, so it's a possibility, but I'm definitely not in the marching band.
BTW, if you want, you can give my email to your friend who's a freshman. Just in case she has any questions, needs help, etc. It's in my profile.
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quote:Originally posted by rivka: AC, your attitude sickens and saddens me.
Beren, shoulda gone to Caltech. They really take the honor code seriously there. And it's not enforced by staff or faculty.
It's enforced by a board of students.
Caltech's honor system is very idealistic.
I'm not sure if the lack of cheating Caltech is due to the high moral caliber of the students or under reporting of cheating by the students.
quote:The vast majority of quizzes and midterm or final examinations are take-home. Stapled-shut tests are picked up in class or at a professor's office. Printed instructions on the cover of the test specify the conditions under which it must be taken, including the time limit, reference materials allowed, and the due date.
If a student working at home gave himself an extra hour or two, who the heck is going to report him?
Caltech's honor code is still not as strict as I would like.
quote:For example, if a defendant has copied one isolated problem on an exam, the Board may decide to nullify the advantage by giving zero credit on that problem. However, if the copied problem allows the student to answer other questions or verify previous results, it is possible that credit will be removed for those problems as well.
Shouldn't the student get a zero on the entire exam?
Based on the example given in the honor code, the worst punishment a first-time offender can get is forced suspension and not expulsion.
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quote:As a teacher, I could do my students a *favor* and give them all A's for all their work, no matter what the quality. They would be happy, I'm sure, but did I do them any favor by setting them an entire year behind their peers in math?
This is slightly off topic, but I've noticed that throughout my education, tough grading hasn't really corresponded with me learning more in a class, or other students learning more. It is as if the danger of receiving a poor grade is not strongly related to how much I learn in a class. So, I'm not sure it is certain that giving all A's really would put students behind.
Posts: 8120 | Registered: Jul 2000
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My view is similar to Storm's. I certainly don't condone cheating, but I also think openly collaborative work should be a lot more common than it is. In university, my friends and I certainly collaborated on plenty of assignments -- there were numerous occasions where we would gather in someone's living room with some tasty drinks and settle down to work on our assignments. If someone had a question they'd pipe up and another person would come over and help them out with an explanation or tip or whatever. "How'd you do this?" "Oh, I did it this way." "Huh, I did it this other way." By the time everyone was done the assignment we'd all be good and drunk, so depending on the day of the week we'd either head out to a pub or go home to our beds.
I get the impression that a lot of people in this thread would consider that cheating, even though there was no stipulation against outside help or collaboration attached to the assignments. And yet, out here in the real world, everything is done collaboratively. I can't escape the endless meetings, and sometimes I yearn for the ability to put my foot down in a meeting and say "this is how it's going to be." But far from being prevented, soliciting the input and aid of others is actually a requirement. I can't get a project through without six or eight other signatures on it, which means I'm forced to discuss my work with others on a regular basis. Most of the time, I view this as a positive thing.
Assignments were designed to help us understand the concepts discussed in class. They weren't there for us to beat our heads against and bemoan that we couldn't get 100% on all of them; they were hardly worth any marks (often no marks at all, but they had to be handed in). The decidedly noncollaborative midterm and final exams were usually the sole source of grades (with a typical 30-70 or 40-60 split).
I also disagree with the notion that grades are earned. Particularly in high school, in a lot of cases (my own, for instance), they are not -- and, indeed, there were numerous times when genuinely applying myself resulted in lower grades than just coasting. Even in university I found that effort beyond a certain minimum had no particular correlation to results for me. It's one of the reasons I think grades aren't a very useful concept and the present overemphasis on them in Western schooling is a serious problem. When you hand out an assignment and the students' first question is "how much is this worth?" something is seriously wrong. School is about learning, not marks, and that seems to have gotten lost somewhere along the way.
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Icarus, Haverford College (my wife's alma mater) has a very strong honor code. It is also a top 5 liberal arts college, I believe. They were allowed to grab a final, and take it, unproctored, wherever they liked. Even exams that weren't open book!
My alma mater, in certain engineering programs, has a different way to deal wit htrusting fellow students... There are people who actually try and wreck lab experiments to hurt your grade (and improve the curve for them). They even have a name for it: throats. As in cutthroats.
posted
Cheaters should be crucified. And, what do you know, as soon as you come out of high school - they are. Plagiarising is taken extremely seriously at college.
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twinky, I agree completely with you. It's funny, for a society that places so much on cooperation and working together, actually cooperating and working together are too often looked down upon. Obviously there are times when working together at school is a no-no (like, on a big exam, where you are supposed to alread know the answers - I've had a number of take home exams where we were told to work in threes or fours).
In high school, I used to meet a friend of mine at a bookstore every week. He was nuts when it came to math, knew more than the teachers most of the time. He'd help me on my math and physics homework every week (I wouldn't just copy his work, by the way). At my school, for the math class anyway, with would have been considered cheating. The teacher specifically said, "if you have problems, only come to me - do not get help from other students." My morals told me that I would not be doing anything wrong by getting outside help.
As for the initial topic, I'll mirror everyone else in saying, you did nothing wrong, which I'm sure you already knew.
Posts: 367 | Registered: Apr 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Amanecer: That's wierd. At my school, everybody who met the GPA criteria and went through the application process (an essay, resume, and some reccomendations) got in. To stay in, you had to complete service hours etc. I don't know understand why a school would try to make the process even more selective than the national criteria states. It seems like it would just hurt the students.
The way it worked at our school was you had to have a certain GPA even to apply (although I believe it was only a 3.0, so it wasn't horribly high). Then you had to do the application, listing all your classes, all extracurricular stuff, etc. Then from those applications, they selected so many per grade (more from the sophomores, fewer from the juniors and seniors). So basically, if you embellished your application a lot (like many people I know did), you were more likely to get in on your first try. Those of us who didn't embellish sort of lost out for the most part. I mean some made it through, mainly because I called them super workaholics (super high GPA + tons and tons of extracurricular stuff). A lot of the ones that did get through the first time though just had a lot of made up stuff on their applications.
Posts: 1960 | Registered: May 2005
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quote:I get the impression that a lot of people in this thread would consider that cheating, even though there was no stipulation against outside help or collaboration attached to the assignments.
I'm not sure anyone who posted here would think that was cheating. Certainly no one has said as much.
The specific situation had a very clear no outside help stipulation and the student was not collaborating but copying. My comments were all directed at this specific situation, except for the side conversation started by someone allowing copying of homework.
It seems most people jumping on the homework "helpers" have made the distinction between copying and collaboration at least once.
Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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First, the difficulty with cheating in school is due, in large measure I think, to the clear artificiality of the environment. What I mean by that is that school does not necessarily follow the practical constraints required by "the law of the harvest". To illustrate: If a farmer played hookey all spring and summer, worked 18 hour days through the fall to make up, would he have a harvest at the end of fall?
However, such a scenario is perfectly acceptable in school. American schools inherit their philosophy from the 1800's when public school almost delighted in boring students to tears and then punished the ones who couldn't pay attention long enough. "Learning" meant reciting a litany of memorized "facts" at the drop of a hat. Schools today are usually far different from those dry beginnings, but much of the same philosophical difficulties remain to be overcome, not the least of which is the artificiality which has perpetuated itself into industry as well.
Here is what I mean: A college degree has become a sort of litmus test for competency, even if it has practically no bearing on how well you can do your job. Colleges have become the industry way of outsourcing the first level of human resources- identifying competent potential candidates. The direct result of this approach is that college becomes less about what and how well you learn than it is about completing the required material and getting the piece of paper. Colleges are enablers of this mentality in many ways, such as adhering strictly to a set of requirements even if those requirements may be shown to be absolutely absurd. As a brief illustration, my brother has recently been battling for the right to graduatedespite missing a class which was added to the curriculum after he was well into his program. This class is a library orientation class- it is meant to get new students familiar with the library resources available. The absurdity of requiring my brother to attend another semester in order to take this class when it is clearly irrelevant should be obvious to any but the most dogmatic bureaucrat, but such are those he is made to deal with.
Another clear sign of this trend is in the way homework is assigned. Everyone has received "busywork"- mindless exercises meant to assign homework for homework's sake rather than to learn a concept. This is problematic because clearly what is "busywork" to one might be useful to another, but egregious offenses in this area have likely been experienced by all.
Essentially what it all boils down to is this: in our semi-meritocratic society it is clear that education (or at least the illusion of it) is key to financial success. Therefore the problem of cheating is endemic to the purpose of the system. The rats are all running the maze in order to get the cheese at the end, not because they enjoy running the maze.
Posts: 4548 | Registered: May 2001
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posted
I'm getting the feeling that my fellows are different from your average student. If they need to copy answers it's because they forgot to do something and don't have the time to do it themselves. Even then, the only time I can remember this happening last year it was with a friend in physics and he purposely threw a couple of answers: he just needed to get a pass on it to keep passing the subject (he gave up football for it, so it's not like he wasn't trying).
Giving answers just really almost never comes up. Helping, sharing, bouncing ideas off of each other - those are common place, even on take home quizzes because when I get into the real world I'm going to use every means possible to succeed. And my school stresses that it's an extention of the real world.
Like Storm Saxon said, it's a lot better in my mind than receiving a giant x.
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quote:This is slightly off topic, but I've noticed that throughout my education, tough grading hasn't really corresponded with me learning more in a class, or other students learning more. It is as if the danger of receiving a poor grade is not strongly related to how much I learn in a class. So, I'm not sure it is certain that giving all A's really would put students behind.
You're right, Tres, for the majority of students, I would say. In fact, I hate grading, and would rather I did not have to do it - instead just teaching the material and trying to get every student to understand it.
I had an honors seminar in college where the teacher started class with: "Syllabi are death. There will be no syllabus in this course. There will be no tests, quizzes, papers, or evaluations of any kind. You will all be receiving A's. Now that that's out of the way, we can get down to the actual learning." It was wonderful, and we all learned a lot.
Of course, it was an honors seminar to begin with.
The majority of students don't need grades to motivate them, I don't think, if they are properly motivated otherwise. However, those at the very top and those at the very bottom have a different relationship with grades.
The very top students see it as competition and status, and a B+ is crushing. The cry of "Why did you give me a B+? Can't you just give me an A?" echoed off the walls of my High Honors Algebra more than once. But, I tell them, that is what they earned - and, you can be damn sure the next marking period that had stepped it up, and worked a lot harder.
The very bottom students often don't care about grades so long as they pass. A D- is A-OK in their book, so long as they don't have to repeat. So there's a benchmark of another kind for them - did they do enough work to earn a passing grade, or did they skip so much and learn so little that it would benefit them to retake the course.
Grades are also important for placement. A student may earn a C+ grade for solid, but not exceptional work. That student would then move into a middle level math course the following year in high school. If the student had been *given* (note that this is not what they earned) an A for the same work, it is no favor - because they will be placed in a class above their level the following year that might very easily frustrate or totally lose their interest.
On another note, the higher you set expectations, they more students will strive to achieve. If you make it a lot harder to achieve an A, the A students will work harder to earn one. They won't be satisfied with anything less. If you make it a lot harder to achieve a passing grade, the D- students will work harder to earn one. Passing is the important thing to them.
So, a tougher grading policy (provided it's not so difficult as to be out of reach for the students) does improve student effort and learning, for most students.
Of course, there are students (like myself when I was in school) for whom grades don't matter at all. I would learn based on how well my teacher taught, regardless of what my grades ended up being. A strict grader may have made me pay a little closer attention to detail, but in the long run I learned what I was going to learn.
So, yes, Tres, grades do not determine student learning, but when all students are given the same grade regardless of effort, effort will likely go down across the board.
posted
Jacare, I agree that this is the case in college, or at least that was my experience.
It was also the case throughout much of my own experience in high school, with some truly standout teachers who deviated from the mold.
However, most teachers in the public schools have broken away from this pattern of "chalk and talk" or "drill and kill" as we've come to affectionately call it. Instruction has become more cooperative and group based, with hands on activities and real world application from an early stage. The focus has shifted from "learn it to know it" to "learn it and apply it."
Even assessment has become more focused on process and understanding, rather than correctly memorized answers. In math education, this has placed a far higher importance on literacy, as students need to read, break down, understand, and create methods to solve situational word problems. The methods used are graded with equal weight to the final answer.
The system is slowly changing, and teachers are being taught now that all students do not learn in the same way, or have the same educational needs. It's starting from the lowest grades and working its way upward.
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quote: It's why I put the word "favor" in asterisks, to call attention to the word being used improperly. It was meant to show the intellectual immaturity of considering that act a favor.
I guess that didn't come off as well as I'd thought.
I'm not sure why you think you wee misunderstood. I believe rivka and I were agreeing with you.
-o-
I didn't get what you did from Storm's posts, LSM. Perhaps I misread. In any case, I personally find your response disappointing It suggests that in your career, monetary success will be more important to you than morality. I hope you are never my engineer, doctor, accountant, or waiter.
-o-
I would be interested in correlating age with attitude on cheating.
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Icarus, of course it's not unreasonable to expect honour, from both the students and the parents. I think what the parents are doing is reprehensible.
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This discussion is vastly interesting because I'll be teaching a class as part of my TA for the first time this year. And shame on me, I don't exactly what my school's honor code position is...I must look that up before classes start.
I'm curious, though, do we have any Montessori-educated people among us? I wasn't myself, but from what I understand, they don't use a grading system the way the rest of us do. It'd be interesting to hear a Montessori perspective on cheating.
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quote: The way it worked at our school was you had to have a certain GPA even to apply (although I believe it was only a 3.0, so it wasn't horribly high).
Maybe this is where the difference lies. I think our GPA cut off was at 3.8 or 3.9.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Aug 2002
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quote:Originally posted by Amanecer: Maybe this is where the difference lies. I think our GPA cut off was at 3.8 or 3.9.
If ours were like that, we might have cut out a good deal of the dishonorable people. In fact, it probably would have limited NHS to the top 50 to 60 people in our grade. That would have been nice though.
Posts: 1960 | Registered: May 2005
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quote: Sheesh, there was maybe one person in my high school who had a 3.8 overall GPA.
Yeah, I went to a pretty competitive school. Several people went Ivy League. I had above a 4.0 GPA and I wasn't even in the top ten. But to be fair, you could get a 4.3 in a class if it was AP and you made a 100. 4.1 for 94-96, and 3.9 for 90-93. (versus non AP which went 4.0 for 97-100, 3.8 for 94-96, and 3.6 for 90-93). So that might have inflated it somewhat, but probably not much since AP classes were pretty hard.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Aug 2002
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posted
See, that shouldn't be possible. It should be weighted. Our school worked on a 5.0 scale and had bonus for honors/AP classes. So if you got a 100 in a level class, you'd get a 5.0. A 100 in an honors/AP class would get you a 6.0 (although the chance of getting a 100 in an AP class was next to nothing). So our class rank was determined by that. I forget exactly what I had, but it was above a 5.0. For NHS (and for colleges though) that was changed to an unweighted/normal GPA form. My above-5.0 changed into about a 3.96 I think. So I mean I was still high, but not a perfect 4.0.
Posts: 1960 | Registered: May 2005
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quote: However, probably the scariest to me is the apparent lack of a moral compass by the youth. But what can we expect? As a society, we have seen the trend to delegitimize anything resembling a moral authority. Religion, private organizations (BSA comes to mind), and anything that may be seen as a moral authority has been marginalized. Instead of standards being based on something solid, they are now placed in the ever-shifting realm of public opinion. The really scary question is what happens when this generation becomes power that leads this country? Since stealing from the rich to give to the poor is accepted as right because the result of helping the poor is good, then its difficult to argue with someone who wishes to cheat their way into a position where they can rob the rich and give to the poor.
Oh, the urge to be snarky, she is strong.
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posted
The other problem you mentioned, underreporting, still exists, though. And they're thinking of changing the single sanction because they think having only one severe penalty discourages reporting. Posts: 26071 | Registered: Oct 2003
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quote: I'm curious, though, do we have any Montessori-educated people among us? I wasn't myself, but from what I understand, they don't use a grading system the way the rest of us do. It'd be interesting to hear a Montessori perspective on cheating.
From my perspective as a homeschooler who does not use grades, I think that's beside the point in this case. The point is that Ic had his students sign an honour statement, and these girls both (IMO) broke that. That is dishonourable.
Posts: 2711 | Registered: Mar 2004
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quote:Originally posted by Amanecer: Yeah, I went to a pretty competitive school. Several people went Ivy League. I had above a 4.0 GPA and I wasn't even in the top ten. But to be fair, you could get a 4.3 in a class if it was AP and you made a 100. 4.1 for 94-96, and 3.9 for 90-93. (versus non AP which went 4.0 for 97-100, 3.8 for 94-96, and 3.6 for 90-93). So that might have inflated it somewhat, but probably not much since AP classes were pretty hard.
At my school a 4.0 was the highest you could get, regardless of what specific class you were taking. Also, the honours level classes were only given "honours-level" if you received an A in them.
Posts: 367 | Registered: Apr 2004
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quote: For NHS (and for colleges though) that was changed to an unweighted/normal GPA form. My above-5.0 changed into about a 3.96 I think. So I mean I was still high, but not a perfect 4.0.
Now that I think about it, the GPAs could well have been recalculated for NHS. In fact, I think they were because a friend was upset that her GPA was high enough before they unweighted it, but not after. For colleges they weren't recalculated though. Most colleges just asked for class rank and size, and if they did ask for GPA they also asked how the school's scale worked. At least at the schools I applied to.
Posts: 1947 | Registered: Aug 2002
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Ah. I think as far as colleges, I was asked for weighted GPA (with what scale it was on), unweighted GPA, and class rank/class size. Not that it mattered anyways. I was top 10%, so any of the places I applied to had to accept me.
Posts: 1960 | Registered: May 2005
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quote: However, most teachers in the public schools have broken away from this pattern of "chalk and talk" or "drill and kill" as we've come to affectionately call it. Instruction has become more cooperative and group based, with hands on activities and real world application from an early stage. The focus has shifted from "learn it to know it" to "learn it and apply it."
FC- this is good to hear, and I think I have seen a bit of this as well. However, there is also the danger of the perhaps equally bad "New curriculum every year". It seems to me that in some places, at least, every new administrator with the power to do so completely revamps the entire curriculum so that no good idea is ever maintained.
Again, this is obviously anecdotal and likely not indicative of education on a broader level.
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IdahoEEBoy, I think you have some good points, but they are obscured by the irrelevent rant about liberalism. One could just as easily argue that it is a conservative viewpoint that leads to this moral decay, because it is the republicans who have been teaching for years that only the bottom line matters, and that means do not. In this case, the bottom line is the grade. And LSM's post about how only the result mattered certainly plays into this. One could argue that what we need is more of the liberal emphasis on fairness, instead of the conservative emphasis on selfishness. Of course, such an argument would be divisive and off topic, and that is why I am not forwarding it. Posts: 13680 | Registered: Mar 2002
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Icarus, I've been thinking about the incident you started this post with. Beyond just being appalled at these parents, I also have to wonder how their child got this far in life without learning this lesson. I wonder if there are a string of parent/teacher conferences in the past from which she emerged victorious.
I went to Parochial school through Grade 10. They handled this stuff pretty simply and fairly. They called the parents in and sent the kid home. Then, when everyone had had a day to think about it, you got called back in to discover whether or not you were going to get an "F" for the entire semester's class or just for that assignment.
I don't know anyone's parents who would've done anything but back up the school on this sort of thing. But then, I don't know anyone who cheated. We just didn't do it.
I remember going in to one test once and cheating. This was 3rd grade. I was so sick afterwards I never did it again. It was horrible.
But then, in Catholic school they teach you about guilt early on.
This whole episode is just sad.
And I hope your thread title is more of a rhetorical question than it sounds. Really, I just can't imagine that cheating has become the norm.
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I worked at a Catholic school daycare. I caught one of the 5th graders copying another student's homework (without the other student's knowledge; she was the top student in the class, had finished her homework early, and was off playing with her friends.)
I caught flak from the other daycare assistants because I insisted on reporting it to the daycare director, principal, and the boy's teacher (leaving it up to them to notify the parents.) They were mad at me for making his life hard because "all the kids in this school do it, you can't punish him for doing what he sees the older kids doing." (The other assistants both had children enrolled in the upper grades of the school.) I told them that I would do the same if I saw any student doing what he had been doing, and I would think that if it was so widespread the principal ought to know that.
They ended up letting him off with a 0 for the assignment and a warning. But he cried and apologized and after the talk I gave him, I hope he understands that what he did was wrong. (I kind of doubt it, though, because if he sees everyone else cheating around him and adults looking the other way, he's going to learn that I'm just the one you don't want to get caught by.)
Posts: 21182 | Registered: Sep 2004
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quote:If they need to copy answers it's because they forgot to do something and don't have the time to do it themselves.
See, to me, these are the types of people who need to fail the assignment. Part of school is remembering what you have to do; if you forget, the onus is on you to do as much as you can, or take the grade you deserve. Your friend that copied deserved to fail that assignment.
Ic, I agree with what nearly everyone else in the thread has said. The parents are worse than useless. Stick to your guns! Perhaps you can give these girls a late start on understanding what honor actually is.
Posts: 4077 | Registered: Jun 2003
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quote:See, to me, these are the types of people who need to fail the assignment. Part of school is remembering what you have to do; if you forget, the onus is on you to do as much as you can, or take the grade you deserve. Your friend that copied deserved to fail that assignment.
I agree totally!
The question isn't "well he would've gotten an A had he done the work, so he deserves at least a B..."
That's just ridiculous. The real world lesson is that if you don't do your work you don't get squat! You get fired. Or should get fired.
People don't look around at the end of the project and go, well, we should earn $1M for that because, had we actually completed it, it would've been great! Based on our past performance, this failure is really a rousing success.
quote: I'm curious, though, do we have any Montessori-educated people among us? I wasn't myself, but from what I understand, they don't use a grading system the way the rest of us do. It'd be interesting to hear a Montessori perspective on cheating.
From my perspective as a homeschooler who does not use grades, I think that's beside the point in this case. The point is that Ic had his students sign an honour statement, and these girls both (IMO) broke that. That is dishonourable.
Well, I guess I wasn't thinking specifically with regards to Icarus' situation with this question. I was really more curious as to whether cheating is an issue/concern when grades are not part of the education system. A bit of a tangent, but it might be relevant in a setting where students may have made a transition from Montessori/home-schooling into a more mainstream system, i.e. college or maybe high school.
I do agree that the kids in Icarus' case are definitely in the wrong, as are their parents - especially their parents!! How people can be that clueless is beyond me. Posts: 952 | Registered: Jun 2005
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Interesting. I confess it's not something I've ever really looked into.
quote:The other problem you mentioned, underreporting, still exists, though. And they're thinking of changing the single sanction because they think having only one severe penalty discourages reporting.
As someone who is instrumental in discipline (both as a teacher and part of the administration), I would strongly suspect that it does. Moreover, I disagree with having only a single harsh penalty. I'm all for throwing the book at people who break the rules; but that shouldn't mean killing 'em with it.
Posts: 32919 | Registered: Mar 2003
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