sadder but wiser

...that should be my student, not me. But it is me.

Now what I need to do? Have the students turn in electronic copies as well as paper copies of EVERY paper. And then I get to file all of those on my computer hard drive, for ever, I guess.

And I KNOW - I KNOW IN MY BONES - that I will get Special Snowflakes going, "But if we have to e-mail you copies of our papers, why do we have to print them out? Can't we make YOU print them out for us?" Gah.

And I KNOW some people will send them in this stupid opensource program a lot of our students have, that claims it's "just like Word" except you cannot open documents written in it in Word (Or at least *I* can't).

Someone else in the department suggested scanning all the papers. Oh, great, I'll get my assistant RIGHT on that. (It rankles me that I have to do ANY extra work because of the cheaters, let alone spend three hours plus of my life scanning damn papers).

But this is the way it is. The honest people get screwed, the cheaters find a new way to cheat their way through. The honest people wind up paying for the cheaters; they wind up wasting their time because of the cheaters; perhaps their degrees wind up being worth less because of the cheaters.

It makes me mad. I know doing the right thing should be its own reward - but one should not be punished for wanting to do the right thing. (I could just turn a blind eye to this crap - which would mean of course I would have even more cheaters next semester - and save myself time and agony).

The student is getting a 0. My chairperson and I concur there's sufficient evidence, even without my having the old paper, to nail her for it. So she's getting back a grade sheet with a big fat zero, and a "See me" written on it. (The thought of that makes me want to vomit. I hate confrontation. I'm really tempted to wuss out and say, "See me if you disagree with this grade" meaning, "If you realize you're busted and that you have no way to claim you actually did this work, then you can leave me alone" but I don't know if I can say that)

I just want to make this go away.

One of my colleagues smugly told me, "Oh, we're all so glad you do this project" (Yeah, because then YOU don't have the heartache. I do an awful lot of crap other people don't want to do)

I'm telling myself next Friday is "screw you guys, I'm goin' home" day - the day I leave for a short visit with family - but next Friday is still a looooooooong way off.

I'm not a drinking woman or I'd be breaking out the tequila. Or something. I really wish I could make this whole mess go away.