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I am a part time student teacher who is consistently seeing a variety of forms of cheating occuring in the classroom. I have corrected on instances that I have seen it occur. Many of these instances include when working as a group on a lab. The students are encouraged to talk about the concepts together but many times that turns into one student who knows and understanding the material filling out their sheet and giving it to the other students to copy. How can I combat this (other than explaining that this is not what group work is for and the next time the individuals are caught both of them will get a zero on their assignment)?

Great question, Olivia, and this will be something you will grapple with your entire career!  If you ever do have the sure-fire answer to this please share it with the world! Keep up the messages about plagiarizing work.  To strike home the message I handed out the forms that university students attach to their assignments declaring that their work is not plagiarized on penalty of zero grade, failure, or explusion: https://umanitoba.ca/faculties/science/resources/Science_HonestyDeclarationIndividual_June2013.pdf. 

What is your purpose for group work?  In real life, no group project requires each of the members to submit their own, individualized copy of their group's work.  So, accept one copy for the group. But, take a jig-saw approach.  You can insist on different sections of your lab reports being done by different members. Not too many students will want to do two sections just so another can sit and watch.

You still have the problem of copying assignments, worksheets and so on. A call home may work well.  Talk to your cooperating teacher about this and allow them to make the contact. You should probably make an assessment if the cheaters are bullying the author into giving up the answers or if this is just a friend 'helping' a friend. 

Try to avoid fill-in-the-blanks, multiple choice assignments. You can't really tell if they have been copied. You could force individuality by having students add a reflection slip that gets attached to the assignment. 

Watch them like a hawk and when they hand in their assignments return the copied ones to be done again and keep returning them until you get unique work.  Or, you can circle different questions for each of the plagiarists to elaborate on. 

IF there are only one or two cheaters in the class - prepare different worksheets for them (maybe tougher) with the message that you need honest data for their grades.  

Punitive strategies: Bounce these off of your cooperating teacher for now - but something to consider.  I would use this as a last resort. Be prepared for calls from home!  Also, make the measures reversible if the students come through with their own work.

• return only one assignment to one member of that 'group' and record that mark.  The others get incomplete.  Tell them that you marked the fist one on the pile and the others were obviously copied.  It helps if you give the mark to one of the cheaters, not the author. There should be a howl of protest that can bring this issue to a head.
• mark one, take off 20% for cheating, then divide the mark between the rest of the group.  

Hope this helps!

Gabe

Hi Gabe, 

I really like the idea of a relfection aspect of the assignments. Often I ask the students how they are feeling about a topic during class or speak to them after the assignment. This would definately allow students to come forward about how they feel about the topic and clearly state that they were confused etc. instead of copying the work I could then make time for them to come speak and get clarification on assignments. 

Thanks, 

Olivia