Cheating Epidemic

Urgh! The end of the term is upon us and students are getting ready to take my final for Government class. Meanwhile I am trying to get caught up on grading. A big thanks to Gloria for doing most of the grading for my ESL classes! Grading has been depressing lately. I have to add notations to students zero grade explaining that there will be no credit received due to the fact that the student copied off another student. I don't care who copied who. A second violation and you get an automatic F in the class. Says so in my disclosure. There was an assignment the week before break where TEN students out of 40 copied off each other. Same halfway completed misspelled answers. Sad thing is about 3 of those had already copied before. So far I haven't failed them, but maybe a letter home to the parents is in order. One girl is having a hard week with her little brother in the hospital and all. And I have her in three different periods, can you imagine the headache that can cause? Grrr. Then today I corrected an assignment for my other Government class that only about half the class did, even though I let them work on it in pairs. Four students, i.e. two groups, had the same half baked incomplete sentence answers. Good thing for them they are not repeat offenders. I am thinking that next semester I will have a parent, student, teacher contract already written so that they have to get a parent signature showing that a parent was notified of their first violation and the chance for an automatic failure. I think that would cover the legal requirements, so that I could fail them if they did it again. I have given my students a little slack because I was gone the first month of the year and all, so it took them a little longer to figure out what they can and cannot do. But cheating, along with all forms of dishonesty, is the WORST thing you can do and cannot be tolerated in my book. As a teacher I see this getting worse and worse like an epidemic. Students often don't think that they have done anything wrong - they have no concept that doing the work is supposed to help them actually learn something. What's the point in learning and understanding information in a world of googling? Are we going to see a dearth of intelligent conversation now that we are inundated with so much information, many of it non essential to our survival or salvation? Grrr.