patience, forgiveness, and unwillingness to eat shit all the time

Cheating exists in all sorts of forms. It exists in fields as diverse as student plagiarism, to two-timing and tax evasion. Usually it involves some sort of dishonesty or lack of disclosure, misrepresentation, and a lot of grief (or fines or bribes) if it is uncovered.

Basically, I had my first student-cheat today. I was marking some sewing work and it was just so obvious that the work was entirely not part of a natural progression (or even a freak natural progression) of something that a student could make. I had the student re-do certain parts of the work afresh to gauge how genuine this done-and-submitted work could be. At the end of the day, whatever understanding and benefits of doubt I had given her was negated with at least two very obvious mistakes she did - after taking into account the handicaps that could have been in completing this 'believe-me' task.

I'm actually rather generous and understanding and occasionally forgiving (as of last count) when I'm on the receiving end of not-so-honest behaviour. At the end of the day it boils down to the dissonance between being able to overlook the disappointment of being cheated and not wanting to eat sh*t all the time. I'm not always able to resolve this dissonance on the spot, for every case is different.

If you're wondering what I did on the case of today's plagiarism discovery, as per college policy, the project's a fail.

Actually, if that student was at LCF, it would have been instant expulsion.

So... I still have lots of work to mark, I'm going back to my pile of work. Dum dee dum dum.