Cheat. To be dishonest or deceitful.
They all know what cheating is. It’s not that difficult of a concept to understand. In math, if you didn’t do the work yourself, it’s cheating. If you copy the odd answers out of the back, it’s cheating. If I’m reading off answers while we’re correcting homework and you’re writing them down instead of checking your answers, it’s cheating. If you have your eyes on someone else’s paper while we’re testing, it’s cheating.
I don’t think it is hard for a teenager to get this concept. Yet, these situations happen all the time. When I confront them about copying answers, they look at me as if I have two heads. What? Me? How could you accuse me of cheating? Well… I just saw you do it. Apparently the fact that I’m an eye-witness to the cheating doesn’t mean a thing.
Over the years, I seem to have come to accept the fact that cheating happens. I’ve even adjusted my grading scale. I don’t make homework count as much because I know that homework is the portion of the grade that is easiest for them to cheat. Tests are worth the most – almost half of the grade. The sad thing is that I’ve done this because I’m tired of arguing about cheating. Cutting corners, copying off a friend, not doing complete work – it’s a trend that is hard to combat.
The reason why I even thought about this in the first place is that one of our JROTC program teachers came by to check on a student. I said that she was passing, but I thought that was because she was copying off of another kid. When I was gone, I had given a test where she scored 97%. She was sitting next to the smartest kid in the class. But since I wasn’t there, I can’t really do anything about it. The rest of her tests have been failures. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what happened.
“If you think she’s cheating, let us know. That’s an integrity issue for us.”
That’s an issue for me too. But I don’t know how to deal with it. Maybe because they run their program more like the military, they have some sort of consequences that I don’t have in my bag of tricks. If I were to ask a kid to drop and give me twenty, they’d laugh at me.
My question is: How do you deal with cheating when they don’t seem to even acknowledge that it’s happening?
I originally wrote this in April. Everything in it is still true. The girl did not pass the 4th quarter of math. I have since found out that she basically missed the entire 5th grade and was probably gone for a lot of her schooling. She cannot add, subtract, multiply or divide the simplest problems in her head. But that still doesn’t solve the problem of cheating. There are many like her that will grow up with a practice of cheating, not thinking anything of it, and live there lives cheating. Now that’s scary to think about.
