Beat: I caught one of my students plagiarizing

[sledghammer]

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Maybe that's still too light for some of you, but these kids are all the nerdy, driven types who really want the boost to their GPAs that summer school typically brings.

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I can't stand these types. They make me sick. They'll do anything for a grade, including cheat, and because of teachers like you (and principals like yours) they are never punished enough to not make it worth their while. Then they end up at Stanford and Brown, where they continue to cheat wherever they can, until they get to grad school.

You do realize you just gave B's to students that cheated all semester right? They only wrote one crappy essay for you all semester, only after they were caught, and they get a B in the class? At the very least you should go over all their previous essays, and offer the same deal (rewrite essay for -20%) when you find out they were cheating. I would be livid if I got an honest B in your class, while these "driven" types coasted through until they were finally caught, only having to write one essay.

[Blarg]

So would I.

But face it, the world is basically full of dicks these days, probably including me and you when we have our own kids. Teachers can't fail or even admonish students much anymore because parents complain, even threaten to sue, and nobody thinks that doing that is wrong anymore.

That makes the school board shiver and the school "look bad." The way to deal with the problem? Censure the teacher, give him bad job reviews, etc. Make him want to either quit or quit teaching the right away. Either way, the parents -- that's you and me, in this scenario anyway -- think they're winning. And the teacher is screwed, and so is the kid, in his own way.

After that's done, we can give lip service to the idea that we ever gave a damn about either.

[sledghammer]

Blarg,

Does the fact that its a private school make it worse in that respect, or better? I would think that the parents are more likely to be dicks at private schools, but that the headmaster would have more power than at a public school. (unless the parent was a huge donator).

[Blarg]

You might be right.

At the boarding school I went to for a year, the headmaster was quite powerful, but he didn't necessarily exercise much of it. The Dean and the Assistant Headmaster handled a lot of that; they both were terrors in their own way, just more or less crazy. But basically, it was a serious place, and being away from your parents meant they naturally weren't available for trivial nonsense, and probably they didn't want to hear it. It was very old fashioned, and anyone caught cheating could easily have been sent home for good.

Regular private schools would almost certainly be less harsh, as the umbilical cord is tied more tightly. But I guess it would depend on the character of the place. I've read a good bit that private schools tend to have plenty of cheating. There have been repeated scandals regarding USC being a degree mill, etc., at a higher level, for example.

If I were a parent, I would be angrier if this kind of stuff was tolerated, because I'd be paying good money to get my kid a quality education. Then again, I'm sure many parents' idea of getting their money's worth is more closely tied into getting into good colleges by hook or by, ahem, crook. Or they may be raising legacy kids who will pretty much sail through school as long as they graduate, so having the kid actually have to learn anything and risk disgracing the family name might seem like an unnecessary burden on people who think they deserve better.