Grade Panic Attack

We are at the end of the semester and students are pulling every trick in the book to get an 'A' without doing 'A' work. I had many students to plagiarize on an annotated bibliography assignment, so for those that acknowledged the feedback, I gave an alternate assignment of writing a 3 page paper on plagiarism. However, the rule was, the highest score they could make was a 70%. I explained if I averaged the 0% and the new grade for the plagiarism paper that the highest they could get was 50%. Only a couple denied the fact that they copied the material from the sources but one of the one's that did deny told me it took him 7.5 hrs to do the assignment...NOTE: The Turnitin report returned as 100% plagiarized...LOL.

This same student has been sending emails to Dr. Benson and Dr. Rice to see what he could do to improve his grade. He even sent me a class email marked as emergency and sent an email to Dr. Benson within the same 20-30 mins stating he couldn't get a hold of me. However, when I called him about 30mins after he sent me the email, guess what....he wouldn't answer the phone and his voice mailbox wasn't setup for me to leave a message. So, I called 2 more times and finally reached him on the 3rd try. All he wanted was to see what he could do to get a B out of the class, (but stated he hoped for an A). I clearly told him that his work ethic was not satisfactory and I knew he had the ability to do a better job. It was obvious that he didn't take the class seriously even after I did the assignments step by step during class for everyone to follow along during class.

Another funny....I even had about 3 of my students that plagiarized (to group together--I guess as group pressure on the instructor) to tell me that they were going to pray for me in hopes that I would give them a higher grade than 70% so they could get an 'A+' in the class (notice not just an 'A'). It is so hard to not laugh during class at their comments.