The Assorted Mishaps of a Teacher in Training (Part 5)

I wasn't ever quite sure how I would react when I caught one of my students cheating. I got my chance today. While taking his test, one of my students copied several answers (including answers requiring a paragraph response) from the person he was sitting next to. Based on the personalities, grades, and behavior of the two students, I was 99.9% positive that it was he who had copied from her and not the other way around. But there was no concrete way to prove it. I couldn't punish only him and not her if I didn't know the circumstances, and I felt sure that neither would cop to it if I confronted them together.

My opportunity came in the hallway as I was walking to the library to finish grading their tests. He approached me and let me know that he'd be missing my class because of an early dismissal. I took the initiative and invited him to step into a private spot where I showed him the tests.

"I swear I didn't cheat, Mr. Jibson, I don't know what to tell you."

"[Steve], this paragraph is identical to [Lisa]'s. Look." I showed him and he agreed that they were word-for-word identical responses.

"Mr. Jibson, we were learning the same stuff. So we wrote down a lot of the same things."

"[Steve], the odds of two people writing down the same paragraph, even if it is about the same topic, are essentially zero. There is only one way that these paragraphs ended up this way, and I won't leave until I get an explanation."

"Well, I may have looked at her test, but I didn't copy anything down, I promise."

"Are you telling me that you looked at her test and then 'accidentally' wrote down the same exact paragraph that she did?"

"Yeah."

"Then how do you explain how this matching section has all the same responses. In fact, what's weird about this is that only you and [Lisa] made this particular mistake. No one else got these two questions wrong, and you both happen to have made precisely the same uncommon mistake."

"Oh. I'm sorry."

"Are you responsible for this?" I showed him the two tests.

"Yeah."

Cracked like an egg.