Cheaters

This past week I caught two of my students cheating. Ugh! I was reading through the students' extra credit (yes, they even cheated on extra credit!) papers and came across to strikingly similar papers. They were almost identical. One was typed while the other was handwritten so I assumed that one student completed the assignment and allowed the other to copy it before class. The next day I spoke to these two students and they adamantly denied copying from each other. I showed them their papers side by side and they still denied it. One of the boys had failed to cite his sources so he gave me a copy of his sources to look at, in order to prove he hadn't copied the other boy's paper. Well, it turns out he didn't copy the other boy; they both basically copied their papers off the internet. When I told them, they still wouldn't get credit because it is illegal to plagiarize, one boy was extremely mad. So mad that he came back at the end of the day to talk to me. He begged me to give him credit for it. As I became more and more annoyed, I finally agreed to take another look at the paper and his sources, especially since he promised me that he only copied one or two sentences, not the whole thing. That night, I wasted my time looking through his paper - which was completely copied. Ugh. I don't know what part of it upsets me most - his begging, the lying or the cheating. Oh the joys of teaching.