The least-discussed aspect of my professional life is dominating my thoughts. At night, I teach broadcasting classes at a local community college. The telecommunications division is fabulously equipped. In fact, the students provide content for a 24-hour cable station and much of what they produce is vastly superior to at least one local station's attempt at news. 
The school turns out plenty of production assistants and a few videographers. There's a lot to be proud of there.
It is the end of the semester, and my young broadcasting students' research papers were due last week. They got the assignment on the first day of class, 18 weeks ago. They received a number of reminders along the way. Of course, most of them obviously waited until the last weekend before the paper was due to actually work on it. That's to be expected. There are sixteen students in my class. Two of the papers are outstanding. 
Ten are above average or good. Four are complete train wrecks. I can't explain how horrible they are: terrible English, factual inaccuracies AND giant passages are obviously copied and pasted directly from the internet. One student didn't even bother to change font styles. He just copied and pasted paragraph after paragraph from various sources, then wrote a one-paragraph conclusion. It's shockingly stupid.
Another included a long passage (Hell, a whole magazine article) without any attribution. The thing is, the article was written in 2002 and made a reference to something that the subject of the paper hoped to accomplish by 2004. I intend to ask him something like this: "I know you didn't write this. Did you even read it?" Honestly, I'm on the verge of being angry about this.
I have found absolute proof of blatant plagiarism and preposterous laziness. My head says to give them zeroes on the papers, which would cause them to fail the course. I know that's what I should do. BUT...they're freshmen at a community college. Maybe they actually don't know any better. What if other students did something similar, but were more clever about disguising it? Can I reward cunning and deception? Would it be inconsistent if I failed a handful? In college, I wasn't perfect. I wasn't a saint. Would I be a hypocrite?
This would not be the first time I have failed students. My conscience was clear the other times. Kids just didn't show up or didn't do the work. They failed themselves. I wonder if these people are actually stupid, or if they think I'm stupid. They have failed, no question about it. The only thing I have to decide is whether to allow them to get credit for sitting through the course.
I've been losing sleep over this since the papers were turned it. No mater what I ultimately decide, I'm sure I will lose more sleep when all of this is behind me.
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How the loser is supposed to get across the river without a paddle is beyond me, but that's a metaphor for another day....
