No late marks for students? Plagarism is now ok?

In My Humble Opinion
21

How then should one go about ensuring that a person has developed the habit of completing assignments on time? Since it is not something that can be learned in a seminar, and instead is something that one becomes accustomed to throughout regular practice, I suggest that it is something that needs to be incorporated into most if not all of a student’s activities.

At what point in a person’s development should a person be responsible for completing assignments on time? Primary school? Elementary school? Junior high? Senior high? Junior college? University? In the working world after being fired for missing deadlines?

Johnny can’t read or write well enough to advance in a career. Johnny can’t perform simple arithmatic well enough to advance in a career. Johnny can’t manage time well enough to advance in a career. Let’s face it: people who do not show up for work on time, or who do not complete assignments on time, get off to a very bad start in their careers. This is something that needs to be addressed in their education so that they will be properly prepared to enter the workforce.

22

Then there must be one hell of a problem with underfunding if students are not receiving appropriate supervision, tutoring and counseling while ISS.

23

God as my witness, I’ve never known a school where ISS was anything but a holding cell–best case, it’s boring and embarrassing, but that doesn’t bother the serious slackers, who find it a refreshing change from “regular” class where that lady talks all day. It’s where you put a teacher you don’t trust to teach a class that matters.

24

It does place a burden on teachers that a paper can be submitted late, what if every student hands in all papers on the last day of school? But OTOH it does teach the student a lesson on time management, and possibly about debt management, plus allows them more flexibility because ya know life happens and all, and people do have unique circumstances.

As for plagiarism, IMHO there is no work that man has every created on his own, it is all from above. As such every work that was not referenced was plagiarized and that’s how it’s suppose to be. We are not all called to bring unique knowledge on a subject to mankind, that’s why we have different gifting’s and those gifts are meant to be shared.

25

Huh. My 12-year-old’s school is the opposite - hand an assignment in late, for any reason whatsoever, and you get a zero. Last week her computer died and she hadn’t backed her work up. I appreciate that’s the sort of lie people make up, but I ended up sending the computer to school with her JIC their laptops were of the same make (it was the power supply that died), so they could see it was true this time.

If she had been allowed to hand the assignment in late. with something like a detention and/or lower marks, then I’d have made her do the work again - at least ten hours’ work - and she’d have learnt to remember to back her work up. As it is, there was no point making her redo the work because her teacher would have refused to take it in.

Last year she got a zero for handing an assignment (another 10+ hour project) a day late, even though she was off sick on the due date and that’s why it wasn’t handed in. She’d put loads of thought and effort into it and I was proud of her, and it got thrown in the bin without even being opened. She also got a detention.

Neither extreme - no consequences or all possible consequences for late submission - teaches the kids anything about meeting deadlines and being responsible.

26

  1. Why can’t the division let it be a teacher call rather than it being a huge umbrella that every assignment falls under? Yes life gets in the way, but do businesses have one giant policy on late work? If they do it’s usually to get stuff in on time, if they don’t then it they treat everything on a case by case basis.

  2. Do you really think kids should be allowed to copy and paste from Wikipedia? If they don’t paraphrase in their own words, how do we know that any of that knowledge is in their head? I could give you a paper right now on my vast knowledge of quantum physics! It’s all done for me. Who cares if I don’t cite. I could be a doctor in no time with these rules!

27

Just so all are aware, it doesn’t have to 0 or bust. I used to take off 10% for a late (gee aren’t I a nice teacher) , and it only became a zero if it wasn’t handed in before the report card deadline. Frankly, that’s one deadline as a teacher I feel needs to be adhered to. It also allowed me to start in the next term with a clean slate for all students.

28

Well, if I handed in all my assignments late here at work, I’d be fired. Those are the consequences of failing to meet deadlines in the real word.

Can we fire kids from school?

29

This is an interesting experiment, but I’m not sure I agree quite with the way it’s being done. Grades themselves ought to reflect the general understanding of the material presented. Straight docking for late assignments seems to defeat this purpose, but completely eliminating penalties seems to defeat the purpose too.

As an example, let’s say a student in math class is assigned 40 problems to do that night based on the lesson in class. Let’s consider two students. One student doesn’t learn terribly well from lecture, so he needs to do the homework assignment to have a solid grasp of the material. Another student learns the material well just from lecture and maybe a couple problems on his own; doing all 40 problems is overkill for him. If both students can perform equally well on the test, why should the second student be forced to turn in homework that he doesn’t need?

I was in the latter group, where I could just be present in class and I very rarely turned in homework on time, if at all. I consistently scored very well on tests and projects, but my grades suffered because the benefit of the homework was only for my grade and not for understanding the material. Once I got into college, where very few professors graded homework, and all I had to do were exams and projects, my grades were fine. As such, I did the homework assignments when I felt I needed to, and skipped them when I didn’t.

Life doesn’t operate like that either. If I’m going to get my driver’s license, or try to get a certification, they don’t care if I spent hours preparing for the test or if I walked right off the street, as long as I pass, it doesn’t matter. At work, I don’t get paid based on what little bits of knowledge I randomly have, but in being able to complete an assigned task by the deadline. If I need to do extra leg work to get the knowledge I need to complete the task, unless it’s training they should have provided me but didn’t, then the onus is on me to do the research and get it done. If I have all the knowledge I need and can get it done before the deadline without extra research, then I don’t need to do it.

That said, kids do need a bit of a different kind of structure. For instance, I wouldn’t say homework should necessarily be ungraded, but perhaps allowing kids who do it, but perform poorly on exams, to help spread their grades out more, since they’ve still demonstrated some understanding of the material; whereas kids that don’t need it and do well on tests can opt to not do that.

I also think, as others said, that much of the testing methodology is dumb. I generally didn’t have much trouble remembering formulae, or deriving them if I couldn’t, but today, gross memorizationg just isn’t necessary. I think being able to derive is important, because it helps with understanding where it comes from and why it’s applicable. But at work, if I need a formula, I don’t spend 10 minutes deriving it again, I just google it. Less time spent mindlessly memorizing stuff means we can more time understanding and applying it. Memorizing the exact date of a battle in the Civil War isn’t useful, as I can look it up, but understanding the situations of each side, who won, and why, is something that’s not only more useful in putting the larger context of the war in perspective, but it’s a lot harder to just look that sort of thing up.
As for plagarism though, that definitely needs a harder line for exactly the same reason. It’s incredibly easy to steal other people’s work or copy and paste from various sources. Doing that doesn’t demonstrate any understanding of the material. Using the same example, if I go to wikipedia and copy and paste info on the battle of Bull Run, I haven’t demonstrated any knowledge relative to the material. This is the side of technology that makes learning more challenging for teachers, because as much as technology is helpful for quickly finding simply factoids, it’s also easy to find answers intended to demonstrate that understanding and, thus, leaving the understanding completely out of the equation.

And plagarism is even worse in the real world because it can get you expelled from college. I knew of at least a couple of students I attended undergrad with who were caught plagarising, and I think at least one of them was expelled, the others still getting serious penalties. And for work, not only can it get you fired, but it can potentially have legal consequences. There really just isn’t a softer line that can be drawn on plagarism that makes any amount of sense.

30

It is a good point, but I do like the idea of leanancy as the default.

Yes, what do you think Wikipedia is here for except for the sharing of information for hopefully the betterment of mankind. It is part of the free flow of personal thought that is allowed by the internet, no longer controlled by a few, but open to many to share.

As for if the kids learned from it there are many ways to determine it is a positive way, such as where the student summarizes the work and takes questions from classmates and the teacher. That seems a much better way of determining knowledge and a much better use of a teachers resources then having the teachers scan the internet to see if they copied. (this works for the doctor part too, if you don’t know what you are doing you will be found out IF the teacher finds out how much you know instead of scanning to see if you copied your work). And copying other people’s work has no bearing on if you really know the information - they are unrelated.

This also works on another level, that if you are looking for plagiarism you are coming out against the student, putting the student-teacher relationship in an adversarial position as a default, instead of a complementary one where the teacher asks questions that challenges the student into deeper thought.

31

Having the kid take questions like that would take half a lesson in order to be meaningful. This might be OK in classes of four. Besides (except for a few students with specific learning disabilities, for whom different assessment methods are already available), if they can summarise the work in spoken words then they can summarise it in written words.

32

We just had teacher conferences last night. Accepting late work for reduced grades seems to be the most common. Some of the teachers indicate a last day for late work for each grading period. One teacher explained she will accept some things late and grade as if they were received on time. There was a complex rubric that I didn’t memorize.

Swallowed’s point is a good one. The very core of what I’ve tried to teach my son is that his actions have consequences. That message is weakened when it’s followed by “unless you’re at school.”

I don’t really see how this balances. Maybe what he’s saying is that removing consequences wasn’t the central goal of the revised policy, but that certainly seems to be what’s happened.

For whatever it’s worth, for as long as he’s been allowed to use internet sources for school work my son has been told that wikipedia is NOT an acceptable source…

We are not in Saskatoon, and he’s in 8th grade.

33

I was gobsmacked to find out that Ontario just reversed a decision and allowed teachers to take marks off for late assignments. They were also discouraged or forbidden, depending on the district, from giving zeros.

That you can turn in assignments late and plagiarize with no penalty is the height of stupidity. I think that this may be settled by grading the academics of the assignment and giving a ZERO for behaviour. It can’t be anything but bad behaviour to be late or plagiarize, can it?

These sorts of policies have the making of an education reform to be known as “All Children Left Behind”.

34

We’re all fucked, and that’s all there is to it. Doesn’t matter what side of the aisle you’re on: people suck.

35

Local news is reporting today that the school board is telling them that they’ve been getting this story all wrong and teachers can still penalize for late assignments and the like. No clue if it’s actually just a bunch of bad reporting or if the school board is reversing itself and trying to pretend that it hasn’t.

36

When I was in school I would often automatically lose 50% (yes, 50%) if I left my homework at home and brought it in the next day. So I can see the benefits of a system where behavioral aspects are reported separately. Though if someone is caught copying and pasting it means they didn’t really do the assignment (which was to write a paper themselves) and so should receive a zero for the assignment, because they didn’t do it. If someone turns in homework late I say no penalty for that.

37

They just released a written document with the switch in policy. Strange how this happened just now. Why wasn’t it released before?

38

I’m going against the consensus here. I think this school has the right idea.

It’s not condoning lateness or plagiarism. But this school recognizes that acquiring knowledge is distinct from obeying the rules. So they have two seperate sets of standards - one for how well a student is learning and one for how well a student is behaving.

39

So they are basically trying to make behaviour weigh less on the final mark.

I’m getting the vibe the Ministry of Education told the school division they can’t keep kids from the Alphaghetto in school until they’re 22 - just get them graduated.

40

Just for another side to this story. I have a friend who is a math teacher. Their school’s policy is that they cannot take off late marks and have to accept any homework until the last day of school.

This works fine if it is an english essay or the like but she feels she cannot take up the homework because then the vast majority of the class just copies it from the board when they are finished and hands it in. So, then she can collect and mark them but then she can’t hand them back since anyone who didn’t do it yet can just pay some kid to borrow their paper and copy it.

It just doesn’t help the whole feedback loop that you need.

(Plus, the school board makes them have a lot of the grade for handed in assignments.)