So pretend I wake up in the morning, and head off to class without bothering to bathe, or change my cloths – for a week. Prof spritzes me with holy water to make sure I’m not undead, then assigns me the following: Dress/hair code violation: male or female – 4 Reprimands + $10 Fine.
I know how fines work, but how do reprimands work, and why should I give a flying f*ck about how many reprimands (16) I accumulate.
Does having demerit points impact your grades, cause you to spend time in detention, what?
Surely you need to study the rules of the institution you belong to (or ask a student counsellor).
At my UK School, for example, if it is proved you have supplied illegal drugs to pupils, then you can be expelled.
Presumably there is a school somewhere that will arrange for your hand to be cut off if you steal…
Fines at school? I’ve never heard of such a thing. First of all, what kind of school are we talking about here? And second, doesn’t this seem like a specific school policy thing? Every school conducts itself differently as to how it enforces its’ own policies, so I can’t imagine there is some magical one-size-fits-all answer to your question.
I’m not talking about my own school, I’m an Engineering Student, and as far as I know the College does not have any sort of demerit program. In fact, the only place I’ve encountered demerit programs is in old British literature and Harry Potter.
Liberty College is the first time I’ve heard of a “Demerit Program” applied to adults.
If there is no general answer, that’s fine, answers specific to a few particular schools will also work.
I’ve seen demerits used by a rent-a-cop security company. The guard who checked my ID every morning as I entered the building was borderline mentally retarded. There was a list on his bulletin board there listing how many demerits were given for being late, for not being in proper uniform, for not cleaning the booth.
(And this was at a huge multinational company, where industrial espionage was a concern. But the security company they hired to operate the booth at the gate was a joke. )
The demerit system was being used in the US Navy boot camps in the 80’s, when I went through.
If you accumulated enough demerits, you would then be assigned to additional “motivational” training, such as running laps around the track until you puke, to get you back into the proper frame of mind.
So, knowing that as lousy as things seemed in the regular boot camp schedule, you knew that it could be worse.
The idea behind the demerit system is that a couple demerits is not bad. (No need for the company commander to go nuclear on your butt for a minor infraction). They just serve as a warning and reminder to straighten up and pay attention to what they heck your doing. All humans have a bad hair day once in a while, after all.
I believe that the Military Academies (like West Point) also had a system like that, but a bit more formalised.
I would also assume that the private schools that adopt a military academy lifestyle also use this system.
I don’t know offhand if the enlisted boot camps still use the system, but I am gonna WAG it and say that Annapolis (et al.) still use it.
We had demerits in my high school (a boarding school), but we called them “marks”. You got 1 mark for very minor infractions, 3 marks for most lame stuff like dress code violation or room not cleaned for inspection in the morning. Late to class was 3 marks, 6 for missing class (more than 10 minutes late and you’re getting 6 anyway, so you might as well skip). 8 for skipping chapel, smoking, or chewing tobacco, or more major infractions like flipping off a teacher or using particularly egregious language (hate speech in particular).
Seniors were allowed to give marks to underclassmen who didn’t complete their morning chore (typically something like emptying a trash can into a dumpster or sweeping a stairwell), and seniors were also allowed to enforce the dress code and a few other minor sections of the code.
The marks week ended on Sunday, I think, and if you had accumulated 12 (?) marks, you were assigned to Marks Work-Off*, wherein your free time on the weekend – usually Saturday or Sunday afternoon – would be spent doing something much more unpleasant than whatever duty you had shirked. Typical examples include picking up trash by the side of the road, scrubbing algae off the crew buoys, washing the student activities vans**, and so on. Each hour of work atoned for some number of marks – 8, maybe?
Marks also “decayed” at a pretty standard rate; if you had fewer than the magic number, they were simply erased at the end of the week, and did not count towards your risk of MWO. However, your cumulative marks total for the semester never decreased and was tracked by the Dean of Students. Your parents received, on your report card, a note about your Conduct. “A Conduct” meant you had fewer than 6 for the trimester***; “B Conduct” was pretty normal. I had a few buddies with “C Conduct”. I believe that once you got to “C Conduct”, you were assigned to at least one MWO session every weekend. Getting “D Conduct” would count very heavily against your chances for re-admission the next year, and I think they even had a way to keep seniors from slacking, too – like maybe they’d send a letter retracting a teacher’s recommendation.
Most demerit systems probably have many of those features in common:
standardized penalties for infractions
manual labor to cleanse you of your demerits
a running total to track your conduct
We all referred to this privately as Marks Jerkoff.
** …and then watching your cute female classmates pile in and drive off to the movies while you have to stay and do more work. Argh!
*** This was actually kind of tough, and I remember that seniors who had managed to be on A conduct for all three years of being an underclassman were rewarded with something like a “class skip day” pass.
We had nothing like the system described for the oddly named “Liberty College,” but we did have a demerit system in my college prep high school forty years ago. Basically, if you were caught by a monitor* or a prefect** or a faculty member talking out of place or being late for class or running in the halls or stairs or fighting or raising hell in the dorms (for those kids who boarded), you got “written up” and the notice was sent to the assistant principal/disciplinarian. You could appeal the “writing up” and on rare occasions get out of trouble or you could let the “write up” go through, in which case you were assigned a demerit. Ten (twenty?) demerits in a quarter meant that you were on disciplinary probation and in danger of getting tossed out of school. Each quarter started with a clean slate (meaning that some kids used their last day of exams to play as many pranks as their current level of demerits permitted). I recall getting a few demerits as a freshman and I still may have picked up one or two over the next couple of years, (you never knew when some monitor or prefect would simply decide that *your smart-assed comment was an offense while the kid they were joking around with had done nothing wrong), but I doubt I got even one demerit as a senior (when we provided most of the monitor staff and the college kids knew us well enough to be able to distinguish a trouble maker from a smart-ass).
*(high school kid with “authority” to monitor behavior in the cafeteria or halls)
**(kid borrowed from the associated college to stand in as a monitor where the high school kids were not thought to be able to handle it–study halls, mostly, dormitories for the boarding students)