About 50% of the students turned them in. They are able to submit them tomorrow for 10% off, and on Friday for 20% off. This was actually expected. One of the Language Arts teachers made a comment that since we did not provide computer time for the students, that many of them would not turn their papers in, either on time or at all.
During planning we started reading a few of them to check the quality. The first one was obviously plagiarized. It was something along the lines of, "On June 28, 1914, Gavrilo Princip, a Bosnian Serb nationalist, assassinated
Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the heir to the throne of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in Sarajevo, Bosnia. This was the immediate event that sparked the outbreak of hostilities in Europe."
by the way, I copied that from: http://www.amscopub.com/images/file/File_619.pdf
It was obvious that this work was not that of the student.I looked in the textbook, and there it was. Exactly as it was written in the book. Nearly every other sentence was either taken entirely or in part straight from the textbook. You could tell what wasn't plagiarized because it didn't make any sense.
My mentor called his parents and rather than give him a 0 and a referral (which would have resulted in a few days of In School Suspension) he offered to let the student re-do his essay and turn it in for a lower grade. The goal was to keep the student in the classroom where he would benefit more than in ISS.
This was an interesting and educational situation, and it was nice to see it handled in a way that was designed to benefit the student.
