I’m debating right now whether or not to write my account of what happened. Leaning toward writing this. And, then I’ll debate myself later on whether or not to share it…Debated…going to share. No names, or any other identifying information. Overall my students are really great. This could be a fiction. There was a lot of cheating, so the story is long. I mean this could be a podcast. It ends well too, for the most part.
One more side note. Why tell this story? Since this whole thing happened I’ve told the story a bunch of times, and sometimes I get requests to tell it. This is also a story for my future students about what not to do. So, here is a long form version. I’m not interested in outing my students, or casting shade on them. There were many fantastic students in my course while the cheating completely overwhelmed everything like a metastasizing slime mold. People cheat in college for lots of reasons. I don’t condone the behavior. I teach my courses because I’m interested in engaging students in the material. When cheating happens, it can reflect on me as an instructor and whether or not the course merits engagement. So, this is a story about cheating, but also about how I tried to turn things around and get students to engage in my course. Anyway, without further ado: