What if I wrote an Olympics column and tried to pass off material from another columnist as my own? What if I claimed it was only for “research,” didn’t know how much to rewrite and tried to get partial payment for it?

The above is roughly parallel to events in a Kansas high school. In Piper, a town not far from Kansas City, 28 sophomores in Christine Pelton’s biology class turned in reports that were plagiarized from the Internet. Pelton gave the students failing grades, but was ordered by the school board to give the students partial credit and decrease the percentage of the final grade that the report was worth. Pelton chose to keep her dignity and resign instead. Several more teachers in the district plan on doing the same.

What prompted the board to make this decision came from what should be an unexpected source: The students’ parents complained. A priceless quote comes from Theresa Woolley in an article from The Associated Press. She had told the Kansas City Star that her daughter didn’t plagiarize; she wasn’t sure how much the research material needed to be rewritten for the report.

Woolley’s daughter didn’t know how much it needed to be rewritten? Here’s a hint: Mastery of the copy and paste commands does not make a research paper.

So the parents, instead of telling their kids that they should take the F and learn from it, complained to the school board and asked for a lesser punishment, which the board told Pelton to give. So much for cheaters never prospering, and so much for parents teaching lessons to their kids.

What is worse in the long run is not the credit given to the cheating students but the damaged ability and credibility of the teacher to teach. Usually teachers are allowed to decide the value of each project and test and how it will be used to determine the final grade. For the board to intervene in as imposing a manner as they did undermines the teacher’s ability to teach the class.

Not only that, but now parents don’t or won’t see the teacher as the final arbiter of the teacher’s own class. “If I make a decision, I don’t know if it’s going to be backed up,” Piper teacher Angel Carney said in a Feb. 14 New York Times article. “I had a disagreement with a parent the other day; right away she wanted to go over my head.” How can teachers effectively run classes when students or their parents just say “I’m going over your head” when they get a grade they don’t like?

Sadly, what Pelton’s students did is far from unique. Typing “term papers for download” on any search engine gives you a long list of sites eager to “help” you with your “research” needs. Of course, all of them have some flavor of a disclaimer, a “this is for research only; cite us or we won’t be at fault” cover-our-butt statement. Pelton’s class, and students across the country every day, show that these disclaimers don’t make one iota of difference – but they make the sites nice and legal.

Teachers are beginning to fight back with services to detect plagiarized papers.

Unfortunately, to paraphrase an old saying, the problem with making the Internet cheater-proof is that cheaters are ingenious. If there’s a lack of a will to work, there’s a way to get it done. It’s hard to pinpoint the biggest losers in this situation. Is it the teachers, who fear turning students in because they will be ignored – or worse? Is it the cheaters, who find ways to get credit for work they did not do and gain no knowledge in the process?

Or is it a group I haven’t mentioned yet – the honest students that are trying? Putting in long hours to do their own work somehow seems less appealing and rewarding when the person in the next seat turns in something they barely even looked at and gets the same grade. Good students have to compete with the unpunished cheaters for awards, scholarships and jobs. They may find themselves in a pool of applicants in which no one cares that others can’t swim on their own.

Jeff Morrison is a sophomore in journalism and political science from Traer. He is a copy editor for the Daily.