Nearly 130 students at Alamo Heights High School have been accused of cheating.
There were two incidents that took place before Thanksgiving. In one incident, 90 freshmen English students allegedly copied wording and phrasing from sample essays from a teacher's English resource guide that had been posted online. The other incident involved 38 juniors in U.S. history who reportedly copied and pasted information from Wikipedia for one of their take-home assignments.
"In those two different situations, there was an assignment in which teachers were reading over the students' work and started discovering similarities in terminology, similarities in words and sentences that students that age wouldn't use," said Dr. Frank Alfaro from Alamo Heights ISD.
The students who admitted to their involvement will be suspended from extracurricular activities for two weeks. Those involved who didn't come forward will sit out for three weeks.
Administrators said that the English students' assignments were not counted and the Social Studies students were given the option to redo the part of the assignment they plagiarized for half credit.
"It's important to note that there were no disciplinary consequences per se. There were classroom consequences which were up to the teachers," Dr. Alfaro said.
A letter sent to parents from the school's principal also noted that the incident would not have any impact on a student's transcript or permanent record. Some parents think the response is nothing more than a slap on the wrist.
"I think if you do the crime you should do the time," said a parent of a former Alamo Heights student. "A lot gets swept under the rug and a lot of people get away with a lot of things at Alamo Heights because of the money."