<p>My last post in this thread: It’s veered into a debate on cheating/not cheating; appropriate discipline/harsh discipline.</p>
<p>The OP said he/she is getting an F due to plagarism and is fearful of its effect on a UCR admission. A few people have weighed in with some suggestions (I don’t have a clue what to suggest). Can we come back into the center lane?</p>
<p>LegiToad: without passing judgment on your actions, good luck to you nonetheless</p>
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<p>I have to agree with SkeezeyJ. Homework alone should in no way drop the grade down to an F. The teacher is pretty clueless to a) not realize this information is available on the Internet and b) take almost the entire semester to recognize it. This matter could have been nipped in the bud after the first 2-3 assignments. As time went on, I’m sure word got around the class (as well as copies of the file) and anyone who didn’t look at the material started feeling like a sucker wasting his time and losing sleep unnecessarily.</p>
<p>The teacher needs to take some responsibility for creating an “entrapment” situation that became too hard to resist – when 90% of the class is failing, it’s not the fault of the class. It seems to me there is plenty of room to protest this situation. Getting a 4 or 5 on the AP test would also be a strong mitigating factor in offsetting the grade if it remains.</p>
<p>@Purpleacorn</p>
<p>Why be the one person wasting your time? It was probably busywork, anyway. The only homework in an APUSH class should be reading, in my opinion.</p>
<p>Because I’m of the opinion that grades are not the goal of education-- learning is-- and the homework might very well have been to guide the reading or help practice the critical skills needed for the AP exam.</p>
<p>At my HS, daily work (which could very well be just HW) was 25% of our grade. So no, assuming a perfect 100 average in the assessments category, HW would not drop your grade to failing. But if I would have received anything like a 93 in the assesment category (or lower), I would have had an F and failed.</p>
<p>If the school has a clear plaigarism policy that is gone over at the beginning of each class and is on a syllabus (all of my HS core classes did), I’m still of the opinion that it is all of the students’ fault. If the OP had been of the 10% who did not cheat, I would agree that the grade is unfair. But if you copied answers from the internet for a graded HW assignment, that’s wrong-- and though you might not be willing to admit it, we know it.</p>
<p>The best thing to do would be, IMO, to write and explain in an extenuating circumstance and be repentant or have the counselor write something mitigating in the school/mid-year report-- or send in new information to that regard.</p>
<p>From the OP’s original post, it looks like the teacher assigned NEGATIVE points for the homework, pushing the overall grade to an F. Even if not, in some schools anything below 75% fails, and it is not unreasonable for homework to comprise 25% of the grade. It is not a question of being able to pass with only stellar homework, but of not being able to pass without doing at least some of the homework.</p>
<p>The issue is that the students are accused of Plagiarizing. The issue isn’t weather homework should be significant, as that is up to the teacher, but that students copied answers out of a teacher’s version of the book, found online. If the students were aware this was a teacher’s version, then they must have known it was wrong. That they were all accused of plagiarizing suggests that they also were not particularly good at cheating either (that’s a whole other problem). 10% of the class was not charged - either they didn’t cheat, or they had enough sense to work at putting the answers into their own words.</p>
<p>The teacher clearly found this to be problematic, but the very remedy - assigning negative points - makes me wonder if the school considers it a violation of school policy, or more in the grey area. In our high school, if kids are found plagiarizing, they are either assigned a zero for the assignment, or lose credit for the class altogether.</p>