Thoughts Without Words: Online Cheating & other things

I have talked about teacher's rights before and have posted a bunch of stories about teacher's getting fired or suspended for writing something online about a student. We all know about the hypocrisy of students being able to blast us on ratemyteacher.com or Facebook, but what about blatant cheating online?

Some teachers recently found out that their classes have a Facebook group made for them. On it, the students are clearly cheating. Some ask what answers are to homework questions and others ask how to write a paper. I haven't seen any posts relating to tests, but I only looked back a couple of weeks.

We talked about this and they are all going to keep quiet and present the findings at the end of the year to our administrators. I said nothing will happen to them, except a slap on the wrist and some "counseling".

One of my classes mentioned Facebook and I said what's the point of having one. They said they talk about homework and other things. They told flat out they ask for answers to homework questions. I said that was cheating, just like copying at school. Their response? It's not the same. It's not cheating.

But what about online cheating? Are schools responsible for this as well? Or is it covered because it's not on school grounds?  I am sure it goes on a lot more than this, but it just strikes me that students don't think twice about it.

Thoughts Without Words: Encouraging Cheating

Darren has a nice little story about a principle who told a teacher that by having multiple forms of a test, he is encouraging cheating. This is what the principle said about the different forms;

“You are creating an expectation that students will cheat,” Martel recalls Cahall saying. “By creating that expectation, they will rise to your expectation.”

Wow! I guess there are a lot of us teachers out there encouraging cheating then. Here is the full article from the Washington Post.