Wait, what?

 My school is on the 4x4 block scheduling; thus this is finals week for the first semester.  For two of my three classes, I gave the option of a 5 page political figure book report (stole this, rubric and all, from Dan Tulli--love him!) to count in place of a 200 question exam.

I literally had a kid plagiarize his whole term paper.  He copied and pasted directly from Wikipedia--even after my I-am-a-writer-and-plagiarism-ticks-me-off. super-bad. spiel! . Aside from that, I noticed three things: 

1. He took out the color, but not the hyperlinks, thus when scrolling down, his paper wanted to take me to the Wiki page about Harvard. Um, no thank you?
2. He sometimes forgot to copy a whole sentence--he actually left a sentence ending with "because."  I'm guessing it was "because" he couldn't be bothered to take the two seconds needed to actually read the sentence.  (Ensuring he learned absolutely nothing. Awesome.)
3. Despite the fact that there was a ton more info on wiki, he couldn't be bothered to copy another 2 paragraphs to meet the length requirement. I mean WTF?

Obviously, being the phenomenal teacher I am, we discussed my disappointment.  I let him know he was getting a zero. His excuse? "Chris told me I could." He said, "I'd already wrote like 3 pages then Chris told me that so I was like, f--, I mean forget this and I copied, but here's my rough draft for those 3 pages..." Chris, by the way, wrote a fabulous paper with one quote.  

The rough draft?  Hand written plagiarism from Wiki.  Because of this I was super excited to give him a zero--after all he earned it!  And I was mad. UH!  A day or two later, the school-wide email goes out saying the lowest grade teachers can post as an exam score is a 60.  Is this what they mean by "No Child Left Behind even if the need to be left behind?"  [Short name: NCLB; other letters must be left off for convenience reasons.]  Gotta keep the school's graduation rate up somehow. 

Well, at least we look good on paper.