Rough day at the Office

So today in class, I gave a quiz on the first chapter of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. The class is the lowest section of my level fours but they are surprisingly intelligent. The quiz was very short: 5 multiple choice questions and one vocabulary question asking them to write the given word in a sentence. Since I'm such a nice guy, I had planned to give out extra credit points to students who could supply extra vocabulary words and definitions from the chapter. No sooner had I cleared the desks and passed out the test do I see a suspicious looking kid in back trying to hide a dictionary under his desk. I snatched it away and continued explaining the directions to the kids. A minute later, another girl had tried to use her pocket dictionary to look up a word, so I took that one away too. As I was explaining how the kids could get extra points with their definitions, I noticed two students in the back discussing their answer to a question and that's when I stopped.

I can handle the talking, I can handle the blank stares, and I can even handle being completely ignored when I'm speaking to them but I CANNOT deal with cheating, and all the worse while I'm trying to improve their grades by offering extra credit. Thus for the 4/4 class, no extra credit was offered and many did very poorly since they had not read the book. The quiz covered 24 pages, and we're in the 4th week, I don't think that it was an unreasonable amount to read.

I know that all kids try to weasel their way into a better grade, I certainly have always tried to get the best grade with the least work but I simply abhor this type of disrespect. ("abhorrent" was one of the words on their quiz) The cheating problem is not restricted to this quiz, in fact several of my students have turned in Wikipedia entries as their own works and one kid copied an entire 5 paragraph essay word for word from a website online. The worst part (and this is where I start to feel sympathy for my old teachers) is wondering to myself, "Did they really think I wouldn't know?"

I'm not convinced that Thai kids do it any more that American kids and it's something that I will have to find a different way to deal with. It seems that reason and friendliness are not the best ways to deal with these students. Unfortunately the alternatives to those qualities are not really in my repertoire.