One of my colleagues is convinced the speech he heard today was the same one a student gave in his class last year.

Before that, I discovered I had a thief.

Every year the school where I work puts on a speech contest for high school students. Oddly, the topics haven’t changed in 15 years. The first year students (10th graders) speak about their dream or future vision, the second year students (11th graders) appeal to someone or something to change something or the other.

The responsibility for assigning, editing, and choosing the speakers falls to us, the foreign staff. It’s such a complicated process that it eats up three to four weeks of class time (each class meets only twice each week).

Early on in the process, one of my students presented a speech that was so good I was pretty sure he either didn’t write it or had received a great deal of outside “input” in writing it. Usually when this happens, the foreign staff start asking around “Did you get a good speech about XYZ?” When we discover two students with the same speech we conduct a version of the Prisoners’ Dilemma. We explain to the students “Someone gets a zero. If neither of you confesses, you both get zeroes.”

However, when my student actually stood up and gave his speech, he’d changed his topic to a fairly weak speech on a different topic. I didn’t think much of it until one of my colleagues told me one of the students he’d chosen to go to the contest wanted to change his speech topic. The student admitted that it had been copied by someone else. Turns out it was my student. The original speech had been copied. Or at least each was blaming the other for copying it.

What I think happened is my student, who usually doesn’t write anything, “acquired” a copy of the other student’s speech and presented as it his own but then chickened out and actually wrote one (or there’s another copy of the second speech roaming around somewhere).

Either way, he got a zero.

Then, today, one of the students in the contest gave a loud, energetic speech. After the contest,  my colleague and fellow judge said that was the same speech the kid gave last year in class for his “My Dream or Future Vision” speech.

It’s too late to give him a zero, though.