Eroding academic integrity:
In Kansas, a teacher has resigned over a plagiarism dispute. She discovered nearly 20% of her students had plagiarized their projects from the Internet…so she failed them. But the school board overrode her (and her principal and the district superintendent) and ordered her to give the students partial credit and reduce weight of the project in the overall final grade. So she quit. [link via Metafilter]
I’m torn a bit over this issue. A 20% cheating rate tells me that the teacher or that school may not have effectively explained plagiarism to the students. Twenty percent is way high. As a former English prof, I know that teaching students appropriate usage and attribution is not easy. Having students turn in drafts for teacher review is useful in helping the teacher discover these problems early in the writing process and work with the students to accurately use and attribute research material.
Of course, when the students know that the teacher can’t effectively enforce the penalties for plagiarism, what incentive do they have to not do it?