Finding the sheet on the ground doesn't constitute cheating?
Have to catch a person in the act.
shareThe teacher is an idiot. Consider:
1) He previously criticized Dillon in class for not being prepared. (Funny how this fact is ignored when the class has to decide who cheated.)
2) He saw that Dillon was the last person to leave class and was kneeling, to pick up his books, in the very area where he found the crib sheet.
Excellent points... teacher should have brought Dillon in alone and cracked him. Dumping on the class was not the best thing to do. But, they wanted to highlight the whole Honor Code angle.
shareNote how a year later, Chris O'Donnell starred in "Scent of a Woman," which had its own subplot about a private school's honor code.
I think Roger Ebert noted that any film with a private school that has an "honor code," the plot will involve breaking it in some way.
Exactly. Actually, this was to show that honor codes like this are BS since they turn the process of identifying the cheater into some kind of popularity contest where the most unpopular guy is accused of cheating. This also allows the teacher to wash his hands and not perform his proctoring responsibilities (if he looked carefully he would definitely find Dillon cheat; the two students who saw Dillon use the crib sheet were busy with their own exams, whereas the teacher had no other thing to do other than watch every student and make sure cheating did not occur.)
Good point, but:
1) The crib sheet was found a few moments after Dillon left, so it did not occur to the teacher that the crib sheet was right where Dillon had been picking up his books earlier. Although the teacher clearly Dillon pick up his stuff from the floor so this should have raised a red flag.
2) It wasn't just Dillon who had previously been underprepared.
3) Again, Dillon was kind of the show pupil there and it would be hard for the teacher to accuse him of cheating just based on the above. If it were some other student there (say, Connors or McGoo), things would be different.
That said, the teacher should have been smart enough to suspect Dillon and summon him in private and show him the crib sheet and before announcing about the cheating incident to the whole class. Then it wouldn't be like "one of you guys cheated, decide among yourselves who did it" and more like "Dillon cheated at the exam, I confronted him with the crib sheet and he did not deny it was his" or perhaps "One of you guys cheated at the exam, I suspect Dillon for such-and-such reasons, but he denies this crib sheet is his."
It was Dillon in the history class when he gets two questions wrong and the teacher leans in and says, "Would you like to go for THREE, Mr. Dillon?" The teacher then says, "Sink or swim."
McGivern gets humiliated in French class by Cleary. Cleary does suspect Connors for cheating because he improved substantially. But I don't remember anyone else in history class getting criticized. The teacher (whose last name I don't feel like looking up at the moment) did compliment (indirectly) Connors at the end the final exam for desperately trying to finish up, but the teacher seems to accept that Connors just studied harder.
Still, a decent film.