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[quote=Anonymous]As a teacher, I have several comments to add to this. Disclaimer: Fully based on my individual experience at my school, and through discussions with other teachers at my school. Certainly, discipline, culture, and experiences could be different at different schools throughout the county.

Yes, cheating has always and will always happen. However, it has become much more of an issue in the last ten years, and phone usage has a lot to do with it. Students can snap a picture of their completed assignment and text it or air drop it to their friends in the matter of seconds. Those students can then copy their friend's answers during class (usually, they are caught; they are often not as slick as they think), or at a later time. In my experience, this has more to do with cheating on classwork/homework versus on quizzes and tests. MCPS has basically taken away any kind of penalty for late work or copying. If it's late, teachers still have to accept it, sometimes with zero penalty. At my school, the most you can take off ever is 10% in the AT category, and you can't take off anything in the PP category. If a student is caught copying, we can't give them a zero. We have to give them an opportunity to redo it, either during lunch or after school. Same with plagiarism. This used to be an automatic zero because we set clear expectations of what was not acceptable and taught what plagiarism is. We still do both of those things, but now, the kids just get to redo the assignment, oftentimes with our help. That is supposed to be a penalty for them, but it also takes away our time to eat lunch or plan--kind of a moot point, as the students very rarely show up anyway.

As another poster said, MCPS has not taken a firm stance on cell phone usage. Teachers have very little control over the cell phone issue that has become a total addiction for most of our students. We can ask them to put them away...they take them out as soon as we walk away. We can ask them to set them on our desk. They then put their head down, use their Apple Watch, or cuss us out and refuse to turn over their phone. There is no support from administration or MCPS as a whole for how to deal with this. Parents text their kids during class.

Giving tests/quizzes on the computer does increase a student's ability to cheat. You can put things in place to prevent it, but the students are tech savvy and can often find ways around those safeguards. This was absolutely made worse during virtual learning and kids had time to learn how to cheat on these online programs while at home. Many teachers spent time converting assessments or writing new assessments for Canvas and are choosing to continue using those this year. Personally, I have switched back to paper, but I don't blame teachers for sticking with Canvas. With students being absent and allowed to learn from home right now, it's an enormous time investment to have to make everything on paper for your in-person students and then digital for the handful of students you have learning virtually. [/quote]

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