Saskatoon schools go easy on plagiarism

Saskatoon's public high school students will no longer be penalized for plagiarism or for turning in assignments late under a new evaluation method for report cards.

Some educational experts are critical of the move — an apparent first for Saskatchewan — saying it creates an uneven playing field for students in other parts of the province.

'I don't give bonus marks. I don't have participation marks. Those are behaviours.' — Katie Kehrig

But the Saskatoon Public School Board, administrators of the school division and some teachers say the new report cards encourage learning by removing penalties for poor behaviour.

English teacher Katie Kehrig said it's taken her 30 years of teaching to realize the benefits of separating academic marks from behaviour evaluations.

"I don't give late marks, or deduct marks if students are late," Kehrig said in support of the new evaluation method. "I don't give bonus marks. I don't have participation marks. Those are behaviours."

As long as a student hands in an assignment at some point, no marks are docked. The same applies to students caught plagiarizing.

"Let's turn this into a learning experience," Kehrig said, demonstrating how she'd react to those situations. "Redo the paper for me."

Saskatoon school superintendent John Dewar agreed with Kehrig, saying that when penalties are removed, learning takes priority.

"I know some may see this as more idealistic, but they see the value of the learning because it's intrinsically valuable," Dewar said.

Similar approach overturned in Ont.

Officials in Ontario took a similar approach to student evaluations in 1999, but there has been a reversal this year. Many schoolteachers came to see the approach as unfair.

In effect, it penalizes students who do their own work on time and accurately, said Ken Coran, president and CEO of the Ontario Secondary School Teachers' Federation.

"So you've got some students who are adhering to timelines and they're meeting those and in fact they were penalized for the others that weren't doing their work on time," Coran said.

Helen Horsman, an assistant deputy minister of Saskatchewan's Education Ministry, said she couldn't say how many of the province's 27 other school divisions are taking the same approach towards plagiarism and tardiness.

"We don't know that kind of detail," she said.

Ken O'Connor, an expert in educational assessment, said he found it odd the province would unveil a standardized high school curriculum for 2010, yet not have a standardized way of evaluating students.

"If you don't know that an 83 per cent or an A means roughly the same thing in Regina and Saskatoon and Moose Jaw, then it really is, it seems to me, a pointless exercise," O'Connor said.