One of the hardest things for me to deal with as a teacher is students who copy their assignments from other sources. I am not talking about missing a citation on a quote or anything small like that, I am talking about a student fully copying an entire paper/assignment from a website or another student. I recently had a student that was under a lot of stress trying to finish up the class before the end of the semester that she decided to do just that. I could tell right away that something was off because her assignment, which was supposed to be an analysis of a crime, read more like a news article; it didn’t mention criminology theories or anything else from the class. So I did a little research and I discovered an article that was exactly the same, word for word.

I knew I had to talk to her and her mentor about it, but here is the important part, she had turned in a bunch of assignments that same day that I hadn’t graded yet. When I sent her a message about the assignment she immediately replied saying how sorry she was and that she would never do it again. I then took the opportunity to do what the title of the post says, I asked her if there are any other assignments that she turned in that she wants to redo before I look at them. She took this opportunity to redo a few other assignments, realizing that this was the time to be honest and turn in quality work. I was very proud that she chose to right her own wrongs with these other assignments. To me, that said a lot more about who she was than the copied assignment that I had seen earlier.

After this conversation, we had a great teacher-student relationship. I am really glad that I was able to turn what would have been a bad mistake into a learning opportunity, for both of us.