You're late? That's OK! You've plagiarised? Forget about it!

The local public school board wants to mark students "based on what they have learned". Apparently teaching them lessons after catching them plagiarising, turning assignments in late or simply not doing them just isn't important anymore.

Is this yet another example of government (or in this case, the school board) further dumbing down the education system? It's bad enough that giving a child a failing grade is pretty much a thing of the past. It's bad enough that the element of competition has been removed from sporting events so that "nobody has to lose". But to actively choose not to punish students for the ultimate educational fraud - copying or plagiarising someone else's work - is a whole other thing.

What's this world coming to?

A local trustee was interviewed this morning on CFRA and she said that it was the aim of the system to use marks as a tool to evaluate and quantify the amount of material a student has learned in a given course. She said that marks are not supposed to be used to reward or punish students as if they are, they no longer gauge how a student has achieved in a class throughout a given semester.

Why not? Was the so-called "old system" flawed?

Sure, I turned the odd assignment in a day late and usually was docked 10% for doing so. Some teachers would say that students could turn assignments in late up to three days late (losing 30%) and then it was a big, fat resounding zero. I never took it that far, but it certainly makes you think.

If the only reason for a marking system to remain in use is to measure the amount of knowledge a student has learned and "other" methods will be used to punish that student for plagiarising or simply not handing in an assignment (why bother working on a difficult assignment if it could, in theory, end up lowering your average?!) then students will be in for a hell of a shock when they get into the real world.

As it is, students leaving the education system to get full-time jobs already have some sense of entitlement. When I tried to chastise a staff member last winter for not showing up one day because four centimetres of snow fell and the roads were considered "too dangerous" to come in from out of town, I was told that this staff member was disappointed that I would have the nerve to try and impress the importance of showing up for your paid job upon this person.

Say what?! If you chose to live out of town and work in town, you made your own bed. Now lay in it. It's not my problem.

What will happen when the student who graduates from the "nobody loses" mentality and they are turned down for a job? They've never learned how to deal with adversity. What will happen when this same person produces a report for a superior and the superior is unhappy with its quality?

Schools should revert to preparing children for the real world, not the next level of the education system. There is adversity everywhere in life. I had my share of successes and failures in school and I will face them again I'm sure. Why should everyone get a mulligan every time they do something wrong or fail in school?

There are no mulligans in the real world.

Honesty and integrity - apparently they will soon be taken out of the curriculum... can't hurt Johnny's feelings if he actively decides to not do an assignment... and you can't toss Janie out of class because she plagiarised that paper - see how that works out in the real world - it's called a lawsuit, folks!

I hope the OCDSB board of trustees grounds itself in reality tonight. Failing to do so will do way more harm to students than these birds could ever imagine. Schools are there to teach more than 2+2 - or so I thought.