students and cheating

When I was first told about the probability of my students cheating I thought ok they are going to try and copy something from online and make it look like their own. Then I heard about students just copying and pasting articles and turning them in. I never thought that this would happen in my classes. I thought that if I made it clear enough that no points would be given for cheating that the students would not do anything. Wrong, in the past two weeks I have had two students try and turn in extra credit assignments that are pure plagiarism. One I would tell right off from the language that this student did not have the English level to do this and had just copied and pasted from an online review. The other hand wrote the assignment but started with “If you had asked me in 1980 something.” Now these kids were all born in the 1990’s so this was just too obvious. When I mention this to one of the other teachers she just smiled and said that the same thing happens to her. It is like the students don’t think that I am going to read what they have written. Unfortunately it seems like this is a common occurrence in this country and this is sad.