Week 13

 On my thirteenth week of student teaching I had to deal with my first case of academic dishonesty. I was grading an assignment on Google Classroom, and came across a submission that included an image of another students work with it. For the sake of this blog, we'll call the student that copied the work Will and the student whose work was copied Robert (these are not their real names, of course). Will had clearly used the picture to complete the assignment, but had forgotten to remove the picture before submitting the document. One portion of the worksheet required students to draw a flower and label its part. Instead of using Robert's work as a reference, Will simply cropped a picture of Robert's flower and pasted it into his own assignment.

The funniest part of all of this is that most of the worksheet including writing in definitions of words from the notes we had taken in class, so I wouldn't have even noticed that the Will had written the same thing as Robert if they had taken the picture out of the equation.

At this point, there was no denying that Will cheated, so I had to figure out what I was going to do about it. I knew that I could give Will a zero and report the incident to the administration, but I didn't really want to do that. Will is a freshman and an athlete, so even though he made a bad decision that deserved negative consequences, I didn't want to affect his sports eligibility or for him to get detention. After talking to Mr. Brown about the incident, I decided to call Will out on his actions in front of his friends, but give him the chance to redo the assignment and resubmit for partial credit. Don't get me wrong, I wouldn't call just any kid out in front of the class. I knew that Will could handle it and that his friends teasing him about the incident would help my case, but not scar the kid forever. I also decided that giving him the opportunity to redo the assignment while I was in the room would still benefit him, though I did not give him full credit as a consequence to his actions.

One problem was solved, but the question of what to do with Robert still remained. Did he knowingly help Will to cheat, or was he only letting him use his work as a reference point for the assignment (which is what he claimed). Robert is a really good kid that is always polite, completes his work on time, and puts a lot of effort into his school work; I could see the panic in his eyes when everything was going down. I decided to give him the benefit of the doubt (this time) and let him off with a warning about letting friends use your work.

While there's lots of ways that I could've handled the situation, I'm satisfied with my decision and think that all of the students learned a valuable lesson about academic integrity. Have you ever dealt with a similar situation? If so, how did you handle it?