tales from the front

from Cheryl T in Singapore:

I once had a 9th grade student who turned in an essay on Greek mythology that was totally plagiarized. When confronted with the computer screen shots of the essay's genesis, he denied it up one side and down the other.

Finally, he broke down, blurting out, "But I didn't even write the essay -- my MOM did!" I spoke that night with the mom, who freely admitted ghost-writing her son's essay. She claimed not to know that cut-and-pasting huge swaths of someone else's writing was wrong. Where to begin?!?

(This happened at a GREAT public high school north of Chicago...)

My favorite cheating story happened at Iowa, where I was teaching the freshman rhetoric course. One of my students plagiarized her entire essay, word for word, from the textbook. She denied having done so and then, when I opened up the textbook and did a side-by-side comparison, said, "I remembered."

Of course, now that I have two autistic kids, it strikes me that she could have remembered....