Class Struggles

I caught two of my students plagiarizing. One handed in an article on student alcoholism that he claimed to write. What tipped me off was that the sentences were coherent. A search on Google revealed that he had taken a published story on student violence from the internet and changed a few words. Under interrogation, the student confessed to plagiarizing a previous assignment as well. On Tuesday a disciplinary board kicked him out of my class.
His classmate stole quotes from another published story. For this, she failed her mid-term exam.
The two each showed up to class, nonetheless, to face me off and rally their classmates.
"It was just a homework assignment," the female student, a television personality on a Bolivian extreme sports show explained. "You should fail me for the assignment, not the whole midterm."
She looked confused when I attempted to explain the seriousness of their intellectual dishonesty.
"I know people who plagiarized their thesis and copied exams, and they didn't get in trouble," was her best response.
And I believe her. Most professors, who hold other jobs, let cheaters slide because they don't want to waste time finding proof, I have been told. Many are afraid of pissing off the students' powerful parents.
So like all over Bolivia -- where protestors regularly shut down highways, cops demand handouts for "gas" and red lights are a suggestion -- there are books of clearly delineated laws at the university that go unenforced. A culture of permissiveness and corruption threatens to undermine yet another important institution.
Before walking out of class, the other student, with tears in his eyes, explained that he had done good work in the class apart from the two assignments he had plagiarized.
"It doesn't seem fair that you're failing me."