This week's Carnival of Education is up, which includes a head-scratching question from Polski3:
A teaching colleague of mine is using an F- grade for those students who utterly fail the class, usually due to a combination of not turning in work and discipline issues. My colleague says it sends a message that the student is REALLY DOING BAD. What do you think? Does it send a message? Or is it overly harsh and redundant?
Also online is Caveon's latest Cheating in the News roundup, which details "mass plagiarism" in the UK:
Examiners say they detected "blatant copying of material from the internet" in some of this year's coursework for GCSE English. Staff at the AQA exam board are said to have been surprised at some of the more obvious examples.They also said some schools gave students so much help it amounted to "a kind of mass plagiarism".
So here's what we do. If you fail honestly, you get an F, along with tutoring and helpful advice (which may be along the lines of, "Perhaps you should choose a different subject for your major.")
However, if you cheat, then you get a big honking "F-minus" in red permanent ink and 44-point font size. That seems to me like the best solution.
Posted by kswygert at December 1, 2005 10:50 AM