Cheater Pants

Ugh.  Found out today that one of the 7th graders has been faking doing his spelling book.  We correct the pages in class, and at the beginning of the year they all assured me they could be trusted to correct their own books (silly me, I believed them).  This gave the student in question the perfect scenario to "correct" his book and give me a false score.  So he only did a few on each page, marked a few blank spaces wrong, and gave himself a decent score every week.  Mr. E and I only found out because Mr. E wanted to know what week of spelling we were on to put on the daily assignment sheet.  When he flipped open the book, he found a whole page that wasn't finished.  And the more he flipped, the more he found.  Even on the weeks spelling has been corrected in Mr. E's class, they switched books and didn't mark things wrong that should've been.  Grr... it makes me feel stupid that this has been going on under my nose for the whole quarter... and even before that! And I had no clue.  They should've been switching books to correct, but I guess that wouldn't have stopped the most dedicated of cheaters.  He could've just gotten his friend involved in the scam and they could've given each other both good scores.

So.  Consequences.  Mr. E chewed him out and made him talk to me.  And this individual has to tell his parents what he's been doing.  Today I went through his spelling book and regraded everything from this quarter.  Yeah, his grade is NOT going to be good.  He has to complete all the questions he left blank and from now on, I have to check the pages before we correct to make sure he actually did them.  Then he tried to convince me to give him partial credit for the pages he's going to fix.  Ha! You should've put in the effort in the first place buddy, then you wouldn't be in this mess.

Just in case there were others, I checked a few of the other 7th graders books.  One of them was fine. The other (a student I hadn't intended to check, thinking, "naaaw, that one has got to be doing the right thing") had left spaces blank but didn't count them wrong.  Lovely.  So I went through that book too and had a chat with the individual that he/she should be more conscious about correcting.  Ugh.  I think I'm going to have to tally up their scores every week instead of having them do it themselves.  They had earned a class prize, but maybe I should take that away too... should the whole group be punished for something one or two of them did?