<p>Julliet, so if your kid makes a mistake you hang him out to dry? I certainly don't advocate the parent's letting him off the hook, but if it were my kid I'd move to minimize the damage while I got him the character building help he needs.</p>
<p>Hi
I would do everything I could to try and turn this situation around. I wouldnt consider it cheating but what do I know. My daughter once got a zero on an assignment and I inquired why. She told me that her science teacher accused her of cheating. She was a junior and never had been accused of that before. I called the teacher. She said that my daughter and her friend both had the same answers. It was obvious that her friend erased her original answers and changed them to the same one on my daughter's paper. My daughter told me that she did indeed compare answers with her friend and pointed out that at the top of the paper the teacher's instructions said, "working with a partner". Her friend was that partner. I went down and spoke with the teacher and got no where. I also asked her to ask the head of the department to review the circumstances and she said she already had. I spoke to the principle and he said, "work it out with the teacher". Needless to say I had to let it go. My daughter still had to finish the rest of the year with the teacher and I was concerned that she would be tougher in grading. I've had a few instances of this happen throughout the highschool years and to be quite honest it can reduce your gpa enough to make a difference. Life is not fair so my advise is to pursue this as long as practicle, then let it go and be grateful that most people are reasonable and some are just unhappy souls who don't really care what their actions mean. They are truly the ones that suffer in the end, you will survive this and at the end of it all, things will turn out alright.</p>
<p>"First of all, I think you need to wrap your mind around the fact that what you did was cheating. It doesn't matter if you were tired, you were studying or whatever, it was academic dishonesty. If you attend a college with a honor code, this same thing could not only get you a failing grade but get you expelled from college. ...
Even if you took the information straight out of the text book, if you did not cite the source, it was plagarism...."</p>
<p>I agree with Sybbie. No sympathy from me. I'm also a former college prof. What you did was flat out unacceptable, and colleges are not likely to accept your b.s. excuses.</p>
<p>"Julliet, so if your kid makes a mistake you hang him out to dry? I certainly don't advocate the parent's letting him off the hook, but if it were my kid I'd move to minimize the damage while I got him the character building help he needs"</p>
<p>I'm not Julliet, but still will respond.</p>
<p>If my kids make mistakes, I let them feel the natural consequences of their behavior. Neither of my kids was ever charged with cheating. However, they've always known that if they were charged with cheating, and I agreed with the charge, I wouldn't be charging in to save them. If they got F's, kicked out of school, lost opportunities, that would be the consequences of their mistake, and I would let them experience those consequences.</p>
<p>My kids did get bad grades sometimes -- for laziness, procrastination, not doing assignments, etc. I wasn't happy with the bad grades, but those, too, were the natural consequences of their behavior, and I always would prefer bad grades my kids earned fairly to good grades that they got by cheating.</p>
<p>Parents who jump in to save their kids from the natural consequences of their actions are doing their kids a disservice. Even failing to get into one's dream school is nothing compared to the consequences that adults without integrity experience. Better to learn a tough lesson while young than to have to learn that lesson as a mature adult, when much more is at stake.</p>
<p>
[quote]
Julliet, so if your kid makes a mistake you hang him out to dry? I certainly don't advocate the parent's letting him off the hook, but if it were my kid I'd move to minimize the damage while I got him the character building help he needs.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>I have no problem in trying to minimize the damage - to a point. The problem is that most people who take on a school in this situation do so with very little intention to help build the character of the offender. What ends up happening is that this kid gets the impression that consequences are for other people and go on to end up with a sense of entitlement that ignores character instead of building it.</p>
<p>There should be a clear line in the sand. While I don't agree with the assignment in the first place, any kind of cheating to get it done was plain wrong. And for anyone to suggest the kids didn't realize copying notes directly from a website is cheating is absurd.</p>
<p>I have been very clear with my children... where they attend school is a privilege, not their inherent right. If they screw it up, I will not be hiring lawyers to defend actions that were clearly within their range of understanding. Opportunities are not guaranteed. It's a lesson worth learning early.</p>
<p>For all the confused people, he copied the notes provided by the website, he didn't write his own notes based on the website.</p>
<p>1 cheating incident is enough to get you rejected from top colleges, 2 is more than enough to get rejected from mid- and lower-level colleges.</p>
<p>Long Term damage:</p>
<p>Our school once had a brilliant kid who was caught plagiarizing in a class junior year. He was put on academic probation and in senior year was accepted ED to Harvard. He was then caught again. The school reported the offense to the school and his offer of admission was rescinded. He ended up attending the local state school -- which isn't a bad choice either, but it aint Harvard.</p>
<p>This past fall, word got around that he had been caught cheating there too and was unceremoniously kicked out one semester shy of graduation. Apparently, he is having extreme trouble getting accepted anywhere else to complete his degree. </p>
<p>This is not urban legend and there have been a lot of attempts to explain the behavior (explain, not excuse), but the point remains: The kid is seriously lacking in some fundamental way.</p>
<p>Well this kid that you mentioned ^ and the OP both have one thing in common: they are in a sense compulsive cheaters. Both of them did it once and got caught,and should have learned! And they didn't. And now both are paying for their ridiculous actions with consequences.</p>
<p>Or in the OP's case, we will find out today now, won't we?</p>
<p>um do you go to peninsula high school perhaps?</p>
<p>I think you need to clarify that a tad bit more. You mean the OP right?</p>
<p>^^^
Agreed. This is AP Bio, arguably the (or top 2-3, perhaps) hardest course in high school. He/she should have taken the time to, at the very least, paraphrase these notes. Copying directly from the source is plagiarism, and must be punished as such.</p>
<p>/thread</p>
<p>
[quote]
Our school once had a brilliant kid who was caught plagiarizing in a class junior year. He was put on academic probation and in senior year was accepted ED to Harvard. He was then caught again. The school reported the offense to the school and his offer of admission was rescinded. He ended up attending the local state school -- which isn't a bad choice either, but it aint Harvard.
[/quote]
</p>
<p>Apparently Harvard has flexible standards around cheating and plagiarizing. They didn't expel the girl who plagiarized significant portions of a novel, even though it was her publishing deal for that novel facilitated by Ivywise that mostly likely got her in. And I believe I recently read that she is now at Columbia Law School?</p>
<p>Yep.. life aint fair. At the same time, that is more the fault of Columbia's law school as she was already in Harvard when the that particular scandal broke.. and technically, despite her plagiarizing her novel, it wasn't academic work. Fine point, and crappy, but not in her academic work. The kid I know had his offer rescinded, so he never attended the school.</p>
<p>There was a well publicized case a couple of years ago where a girl admitted to Harvard got her admission withdrawn because it turned out she plagiarized some newspaper article she had written. Her father had sued her HS to make her sole Val because the school was trying to make her share the spot with another student (she had not had to take some classes that had no weighting - PE I think - required of all other students so her GPA was a bit higher than another student who had no choice but to take the unweighted class). Anyway she won the case in court and was sole Val, but all the publicity caused a reporter to look into some of her 'ECs' and it was found she had plagiarized parts of this newspaper article. Her admission to Harvard was rescinded.</p>
<p>Blair Hornstein</p>
<p>Ahh, i get it now, I thought it was an online textbook he was talking about, not straight notes. Those silly gooses don't know the meaning of the term paraphrase.</p>
<p>Anyway, good luck with not getting the F, 2 cheating rulings will kill ya.</p>
<p>seriously, if you spent "hours and hours" studying the notes.. at least take time to paraphrase stuff. there' s a huge difference, and if you're in AP bio and wanting to attend top schools you better darn well know the difference.</p>
<p>Re: Blair Hornstein Project</p>
<p>This is the entitlement I have referred to. And this is just one example of two sides of the coin (aka what daddy's money will get you).</p>
<p>I have not read all the posts here, but I had to say something after I read the very first line of the OPs original post. He says that the sh** HAPPENED TO HIM, not that HE was the one who did the bad thing. So he is just the victim here?? Geez. Caught twice cheating?? He does not deserve a spot in a good college or university. Community college, if anything, for this guy At least until he can grow up and take full responsibilities for HIS actions.
Sorry if I have repeated what others have said here.</p>