DD accused of cheating at school

[Grizzzly]

DD (11) is working on a school project with another girl in her class. The kids have been paired up by the teacher and the kids got no say on who they had to work with.

DD is quite academic and enjoys her school work and is very much enjoying this project. The other girl however is not on the same page, she isn’t interested in it and when the girls meet up after school to work on it the other girl just wants to watch YouTube videos or play games.

The bits the other girl has managed to do are (in DDs worse) “scruffy and incorrect”. DD has got frustrated and has redone the other girls work but still credited it to the other girl.

the teacher picked up on this and said she could tell DD had written what was meant to be written by the other girl. She questioned the girls, showed them the “suspicious work” and the other girl said “I didn’t do that”. DD then had to admit that she’d done it. She got into a lot of trouble and then told the teacher “well I don’t want to be held back by her, I want to win”. This got her into more trouble.

AIBU to side with DD on this? The best project wins a prize and will have their work displayed.

You cant justify any behaviour with ' oh she wanted to win'

Put in extra work modestly?

She decided the other girl's work wasn't good enough so tried to forge it. I'm sorry but there's no way to spin this as a good thing. She has to learn that what she did was wrong and I can't believe how many posters don't see it.

You're one of 15 groups. The best one to give a presentation on river rats gets 1 million pounds. (Many children do really want these prizes and desperately desire the haribo or whatever the prize was, maybe it is irritations but they're children). I'm pairing you with X. X's capabilities are so different to yours, it can be told simply looking at it there's no way they could have written it. You wouldn't try to make your presentation the best? You can't try and imagine anyone else would? What about a child?

Can you really not see it from a childs perspective? I'm sure you were one once.

The issue here was this competition, it isn't appropriate for the age of the children. Something like this was bound to happen.

Yes it was wrong. It doesn't mean that the situation/teacher can't also be wrong.

It's really not unusual to give prizes for projects. I am surprised people havent come across this before even at primary. The dd must surely have taken psrt in competitive team events before?

The comparison to putting the fastest runner in to do the slowest runners leg of a trlay is very apt.

@Idontwanna No, don't you see, the DD's partner obviously has SEN but DD just Lacks Empathy (part of the reason this thread has made me uncomfortable is that, while I have no clue about the girl in question, a lot of the behaviour isn't atypical of an autistic child and we get the empathy thing thrown at us a lot).
But I feel like if the REAL lesson was supposed to be teamwork then the teacher shouldn't have made it seem like the actual goal was to get a prize. Second guessing the teacher's actual aims was something I struggled a lot with at school and at least in the adult world nobody has ever been so unclear about what the goals of a task are.

I know. No one stopped to wonder whether OP's DD could be neurodiverse herself, simply because she's academic and sounds like a high achiever. Not even the poster claiming to have 20 years experience. Plenty have assumed it of the other kid. Funny that.

Ridiculous and why should my child's grade be dependent upon anyone else?

Because the assignment is graded on how the child works with someone else perhaps🤔

How can it be if the best overall project wins a prize? Obviously the behaviour being incentivised by the teacher was best project not best at working with others. Whether the teacher intended it or not, that is what they made most important.

I did consider it. What she did is wrong and she needs teaching that it is wrong, whether or not she is ND. She's fortunate enough to be bright, but getting in life includes the ability to work with others without disparaging their efforts. It's a teaching point whatever.

As I repeat, my issue is with the adults on this thread who seek to justify this child's actions because the other child's work was substandard.
I understand why a child might make that mistake. I don't understand why any adult couldn't see the problem. And I have an able 11 year old daughter who is paired with a challenging lad for some subjects.

As I repeat, my issue is with the adults on this thread who seek to justify this child's actions because the other child's work was substandard.

You also had issues with my posts which definitely wasn’t justifying the OPs DDs actions because the other child’s work was substandard.

Nope, I think the OPs DD was justified in her actions because her teacher set the assignment poorly by making it a competition for best project, and then when the OPs DD sought guidance in private regarding her partners substandard work this same teacher accused her of tale-telling (lying) and sent her off with no guidance on how to handle the situation appropriately. So the DD did extra work above and beyond to deliver a project to a high standard.

The teacher then had the gall to accuse the OPs DD of “cheating” which further underlines the teachers objective wasn’t to grade or teach the children on working with a partner but to have a competition to produce the best project for a prize. The teacher is also punishing the DD for doing exactly what team members are expected to do in real life work projects…which is called quality control and rewarded. And we wonder why there is a gender gap when girls in school are punished by batshit teachers for the exact same actions that are rewarded in the professional project management world.

The teacher is fully to blame for mismanaging the whole thing from start to finish. That is my justification. And you have had a problem with it.

@Discovereads This is the thing that bothers me. In the adult world so far I haven't at any point had to maintain the fiction that someone was working exactly half and half with me on something and indeed if I let bad work slip for those reasons "because of teamwork" I'd certainly be pulled up in it. But this seems like one of those things schools do to try to engineer social skills but which are entirely artificial in adult life.

As I repeat, my issue is with the adults on this thread who seek to justify this child's actions because the other child's work was substandard.

The kid was in the wrong and I haven't really seen anyone saying otherwise. Was her behaviour right? No. Was it understandable in the circumstances (which is not the same as justifying or excusing it) ? Very likely.

You can't simply look at the behaviour and not consider the circumstances and just label it as wrong.

As you well know, all behaviour is communication. Even behaviours we don't agree with or we might find unpalatable. That's why we look at what happened,how it happened, why it happened and offer guidance and alternative to help the child manage better in the future.

We don't just tell them they're wrong ,label them as lacking empathy/cruel/bossy/arrogant/whatever and that's that.

What a thoroughly shit assignment. I was the "top pupil" and i was very serious about achieving the best marks i could. In your daughters situation i'd have been very distressed at having a "partner" who couldn't be arsed, barely wrote anything, and got it completely wrong. I prided myself on doing the best, so knowing i wouldn't stand a chance to win the prize would have upset me, and made me really frustrated at partner. I probably would have done what your daughter did to be honest, okay it's not the "right" thing, but to an 11 year old it's a big deal.

Totally inappropriate to give a prize to the "best" project, as some kids won't give a shit, i remember plenty who wouldn't have cooperated, your daughter was powerless to make her partner actually do the work. It's basically punishing those who got lumbered with the "can't be arsed" kids as project partners, and setting them up to fail. It should never be on a fellow pupil to be the one coercing/encouraging another to actually do their work.

omg, can't believe ppl are taking this so seriously. It's enriched learning for kids. It will be a nice opportunity for kids to mix with new people, to possibly shine who can't shine at the usual tasks, it works on different or new skills.

How did she "get in trouble mean", OP? Sounds like mere verbal scolding.

It's a project about teamwork practice which is precisely what didn't happen here (learning the lesson or the actual teamwork): but hopefully happened well for some teams and some new friendships happened, too. How desirable was the prize ?!! Adult DD is the most competitive person I know & would have shrugged this one off at 11.

Your daughter was in the wrong. She belittled the other child's work and just threw it away. I have a child who is dyslexic and when she has worked in a pair and had her ideas belittled by a child who thinks they are more intelligent it breaks her (she has told me some of ideas which put across and all were good but other child felt they were more intelligent and did not want to listen) your daughter failed on working as a team and showed very little empathy. She had no right to say the other child's work was not good enough and I if it was my child would be asking her to put herself in other child's position. How would she have felt if all her work had been deleted. I would also question if other child was only just wanting to watch YouTube or if this is daughter making excuses or was she perhaps telling other child their ideas were not good enough and other child decided youtube was better option.

"You can't simply look at the behaviour and not consider the circumstances and just label it as wrong."

"What a thoroughly shit assignment."

Well I guess we weren't in the room when the assignment was set so we don't know exactly what the instructions were, or how they were advised to go about it.

We also only have the word of op's dd that she desperately tried to alert her teacher to the difficulties ahead of the hand in date but was told off for tale-telling. Maybe she was told 'it doesn't matter, just focus on your parts of the assignment like everyone else is managing to do....I don't want any more tale-telling'. She's proven herself dishonest so I'd take anything she says to minimise her wrongdoing with a pinch of salt.

But if the other kids, who were probably in diagonal pairings too, managed to submit work without removing one partners work and forging a replacement, both this year and in all previous years that the teacher has set this assignment, then I think it's fair to assume that op's dd is in the wrong and the adults around her would do well to use the experience to teach her that rabid competitiveness, at the expense of integrity and the feelings of others, is not a good look.

Well, when I was young my work was kind of scrappy. It's not that I didn't try, but it just wasn't 'neat'. I wasn't one of the little girls whose work always seemed pretty and colour coded on the page, and where there were no smudges and all the words were in the lines with no crossing out. I tried but my work was always smudgy, messy and not as I wanted it. I also had a lot going on in my personal life while I was at school, so what I thought was trying would have looked like not bothering to some of my friends and their parents.

If I had been your daughter's partner and had done some writing that looked scruffy I'd have known what it looked like and that it wasn't as neat and pretty as how your daughter would have done it. But if she'd then taken my bit out and done the whole thing herself because she thought my contribution wasn't good enough, I'd have felt upset and angry by that - even if I didn't say so.

I empathise with your daughter and her desire to win. However, sometimes it's better to support team mates, encourage each other, work to each others strengths and feel pride in the imperfect, than win at all costs.

@AlmostAJillSandwich what a thoroughly pompous, boasty post. The 'can't be arsed' kid might have sen, did that even occur to you ???

So I think this is really tough on an 11yo to understand and deal with. I had group assignments in my masters as a grown up with lots of professional work experience and bloody hated having group work. I deliberately avoided any modules assessed at group level as I didn’t want to deal with other students being lazy.

Gosh, I've just read a bit more of the thread and can see that your DD actually knew she was doing wrong by deleting a whole half page of someone else's work without their knowledge, and writing a whole page in its place herself, and trying to make it look like the other girls writing, even adding in spelling errors.

Wow! I can see why she did that, but that is quite extreme and it's really good she's received a strong message that this is wrong. If she'd got away with that it would have sent totally the wrong messages.

What your DD did was disrespectful to her classmate (on many levels - how patronising adding in spelling errors!), frausulant (not that she will fully understand that age 11), clever, dishonest and highlights a desire to win at all costs. It is v good this is stamped out now. Very good.

I do feel for your DD, but am pleased teacher is coming dow hard on this behaviour

Indeed you'd be sacked if you just left in someone's bad work in a presentation and presented it regardless!

I also don't think it was wrong for the dd to tell the teacher that the other girl was holding her back. It's not like the other girl worked really hard and did her best - she was on YouTube when the dd was trying to get this project completed. Dd was telling the truth and she shouldn't have to dress it up lie for all this 'be kind' bullshit.