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.

So trying to copy the other girls handwriting and deliberately putting in small errors and spelling mistakes were not strategies designed to fool the teacher and win the prize by deception? I am sure the 11 year old didn’t see it those terms but needs it explained to her that yes, trying to achieve outcomes by deception is cheating.

*It’s hard when you do things well and are a perfectionist and someone doing something you are responsible for is doing a crap job and sabotages it.

Dd2 had similar thing at primary - she gets it from Dh. They just don’t suffer fools gladly.*

Sounds delightful.

Can we all agree that regardless of the rights and wrongs of both girls - and they have both made mistakes - the teacher has a big lesson to learn from this?

Group work is really difficult.
I wouldn't say your DD has 'cheated' but she hasn't followed the rules and was quite unkind about another child (even if she was just giving her honest opinion).

It's just a learning curve. I understand why your DD would be frustrated. When you say she's in trouble, what is her punishment?

If it was my DD I would sympathise and talk though what she could do differently next time.

She was pushed into the deception out of desperation as she tried to tell the teacher the other girl was not doing the work but was accused by the teacher of lying and sent away with no guidance or support whatsoever. The poor girl was probably terrified she’d end up with a poor grade due to being paired with a lazy, work refusing partner. If the teacher had listened to her and believed her in the first place, she would have been told how to handle the situation. You can’t blame a child for choosing poorly when they’ve asked for help and been called a liar and sent away.

Yes. The teacher is most at fault in all this.

Too much is being made of this at 11 yrs old skills are being learned the object of the task was wrong, we all have different skills, hers was presentation, the other girl could have had all the ideas or practical skills. I don’t see the point of setting a random selected group task and then mandating individual contributions.
The teacher should just have made the point that both should have contributed and scored the project accordingly without any mention of cheating.

Maybe she/he did just that.

Yes kind of, they had to each contribute to each section of the project and highlight who had wrote what. The idea was to show they had worked together.

So you want to support your DD who has explicitly broken the rules of TVs assignment in order to achieve a higher score than would otherwise have been achieved.

I'm very surprised that do many posters have not really grasped the situation. The child here has pretended to have worked well with someone else in order to do better than they could otherwise have managed

Working together in small groups is the closest school ever gets to be like work. The skills that are required to work in a team are very different to those required to 'win' as an individual.

completely rewrote the other girls work, tried to do it in different handwriting and credited it to the other girl so yeah, in the real world this would be fraudulent I guess.

Halfhearted, much?

At that age they need really clear parameters and “what to do if” scenarios so they are clear. I can see why your daughter redid the other child’s work - it’s a dilemma really because her desire to hand in good work and potentially win in her mind would trump the need for the other child to show what they could do. I don’t think it sounds like it was set up properly to be honest.

I understand why DD did it, but group projects are about teaching each child to pull their weight, to teach children to co-operate so each achieves their best work, and, if necessary, call each other out when they don't do their fair share. The correct course of action would been for DD to have gone to their teacher to ask for intervention, however, it teacher didn't make that clear, then teacher also takes some of the blame. Cheating is a strong term, though.

The child here has pretended to have worked well with someone else in order to do better than they could otherwise have managed

Thats not true. The child told the teacher the other girl was not working and was called a liar by the teacher. The teacher pushed the child into the pretence by refusing to believe the truth.

The correct course of action would been for DD to have gone to their teacher to ask for intervention,

The OP stated that her DD did in fact go to the teacher for intervention but was told off for “tale telling”, aka was called a liar. The DD did take the correct course of action but was failed (again) by the teacher.

Yes other partner shouldve paid more attention when they were together but they did submit work. OPs DD decided that work wasn't good enough so wrote out work with spelling mistakes to mimmick the writing of her partner and told T that they both worked on it. Total lie. Conscious decision made by OPs DD!

T shouldve made success criteria clear (that teamwork is more important than info gathered), other partner should not have played games, but ultimately backing daughter in this scenario is teaching her that forging someone's writing is OK, disregarding other people's work is OK, losing is bad, winning is what's most important regardless of anything else, other people's feelings don't matter, and lying is OK!

Oh that sounds like Uni assignment hell at 11. She went too far by copying the other students writing and style but I can admire the bare face cheek necessary for it😂

I’ve worked in lots of different types of teams and with other teams in different counties and time zones and nothing has ever been as much hassle as the kind of team work assignment set in school or uni.

In that case it’s a good lesson for your DD on following the brief

I would support the school on this.

Your dd deliberately did something she knew was against the rules because she wanted to win, and in doing so she stopped the other girl from having her work marked. Even if the other girl made no effort, she didn’t deserve to be erased from the project and your dd needs to learn that if pert of the task was about working as a team, then that’s what she needs to do.

Maybe the teacher already has plenty of examples of great work your dd has done so she wanted dd to be challenged on the teamwork aspect of a task.

...laughs bitterly from 30 years in the workplace being blamed for colleagues being shit where I didn't take up the slack if they were being bellends... and being told to not bother management with petty whining...

The problem with it is that if she facilitates somebody else's academic work, it's easy to think that completing somebody's sole work is also OK. Like buying from essay farms or selling work to them. She's learned that falsifying work doesn't get her advantage. Which is a good thing, really - after all, she's less likely to slack off and let somebody else do her work or buy an essay at some point in the future, thinking that it's a normal thing to do when you don't have time, can't be bothered or any other pressure gets in the way now.

The experience and assessment of working collaboratively is a genuine learning outcome. Of course it's a teacher's job to encourage and assess that, to not dominate, to negotiate, to accept the other person might do things differently or not at all, in academic subjects, in practical subjects, in sport, in leisure activities - because it comes up at work and academia all the time.

Anyhow, the issue is that she did cheat for a perceived advantage to herself. And the disinterested one has also learned that you can't sit back and leave somebody else to do the heavy lifting if you want something AND that cheating is found out.

I'd frame it as something she can learn from. She knows not to do things that way again. Which is a very useful learning outcome.

You've confirmed that she knowingly falsified work and presented it as someone else's.

This is totally fraudulent and wrong. Whatever reason is behind this does not justify the behaviour and sets a dangerous precedent. I'd be making that pretty clear. 11 is old enough to know right and wrong.

The nature of the tasks and rewards were clearly a bad idea but that doesn't make the response ok. I'd say it is an important lesson learned.

Teacher to blame. Prize for a team effort is poor teaching as the competitive students will deeply resent havingweaker partners and get massively frustrated. Not sure you can do anything except explain to DD teacher is an idiot and move on.

It's a joint project. I don't see how there's any "cheating"!

Ok the rewrite is fraudulent passing off and should not have happened.
(You need to teach her about footnotes)

If she tried to speak to the teacher and was told off she should have spoken to you about it.

I would suggest that you have a conversation about how she can come to you for advice on how to deal with the teacher setting a work and objecting when DD points out she has a problem. Unfortunatly that type of situation can and will happen as she gets older and she needs to know when and where to get help to deal with it.

Because OPs daughter did the entire project by herself (not because the other partner did nothing but because it wasn't good enough for OPs daughter) , forged her partners handwriting to make it look like she had written it. She only got caught out because the other student admitted that wasn't the work she had written, forcing OPs daughter to come clean. And she admitted she did all of this because she wanted to win.... How is that not cheating?

Did it occur to your DD how the peer would have felt by re-doing her work? My DD is dyslexic and her self-esteem would plumment because she would not feel 'good enough' if someone else in the group took over. Many kids with less academic ability always feel worse off because they cannot perform to the standard of their peers, and your DD would have reinforced these feelings.

I wouldn't say that it is appalling teaching.

I would say that it is appalling marking, And that accusing someone of cheating for rewriting someone's work is not on.