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Wednesday, September 15, 2010

cheating is cool, I guess....

Yesterday I was watching a program that told of a group of students that were cheating on an essay by getting their information on  line.  The teacher used a program called Turnitin.com and she failed 28 of her students for cheating.  Instead of the parents being angry at their kids for cheating, the parents went to the school board and demanded the teacher be overruled.  She was the the kids were all given passing grades.  Is that fair?  Should the school board step in and overrule a teacher in such a case?  The teacher felt the school board usurped her authority and she quit after the kids laughed at her and let her know they had won out in the end?

But who wins out in such cases?  Certainly not the kids who have now learned that cheating is an accepted way of life.  Nor, us as a society.  These kids think it is okay to cheat their way through life and that is not fair to the kids who are working hard for their grades and want to make it through school the right way.  One of the parents said she thought the teacher missed a chance to teach the kids one of life's lessons when she accepted what they did and just did a few classes on cheating.  Well, if you cheat you fail...How is that for a life's lesson?  Why did this parent not teach her kids that cheating was wrong from the beginning?  The only winners here are the kids who got their grades the honest way and the teacher who had  the guts to do the right thing.

5 comments:

  1. Oh my goodness. This is horrible and wrong on so many levels. What are parents thinking? What will the next thing be that they get them out of? Teachers hands are tied enough without parents and school boards stepping in at inappropriate times. You are so right...what has this taught these kids? Very sad if you ask me.

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  2. I don't know the details such as the kids ages, so I will make a general comment. I was a teacher and understand that kids have to be taught how to write an essay and what is cheating and what isn't. In research essays where you're basically distilling information gathered from sources, this isn't necessarily as easy as it seems. So, it might be possible that the teacher went a little overboard. Perhaps a lesson followed by do-over would have been the way to go -- although re-reading 28 essays is adding to the teacher's load by quite a lot.

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  3. I look down the road to these kids who skate by on someone else's hard work and they enter the work world without the knowledge of studying. How far can they go? Maybe they can cheat their way thru life? It's a domino affect and I blame the parents for accepting it and not upholding the teacher's actions.

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  4. My daughter does a lot of essays and is expected to get some info online - but from appropriate sources - because the books and papers aren't accessible easily otherwise. However, if the point of the exercise was to do library research, then the teacher was in the right. If she hadn't specified, then maybe the kids were right. Given that so many kids did it, she should have marked the work accordingly and issued another project stating clearly that ONLY library books should be used and she would not be so lenient.

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  5. I don't quite understand the situation. Did the teacher give the children the internet site to find the answers? Or did the kids find out the site that she was using for her own personal use, to get the answers. This is a bit confusing.
    I do know of teachers who will direct their students to a website for helpful information.
    But I can't figure out from this post if thats what she did or not.
    Either way, cheating is unacceptable. No matter what the circumstance.
    Love Di ♥

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