Is this considered cheating?

It doesn’t sound like cheating to me, but you don’t exactly say what the school considers appropriate.

If your parents are okay with it, you should be too. When you take your next French class, why not ask ahead of time if what you did is okay.

If you use a calculator for math, what’s there against a translator for French? It’s just reassurance, it’s healthy.

It’s not cheating based on what you said.

What if an answer had been wrong, would you have been tempted to change it? Like the calculator for math, if the test allows calculators, it is not cheating, if the test doesn’t then it is, even if you had everything right already. I don’t think you realy cheated, because it is your work that you handed in. But, if you are not allowed to look up on the internet for a test, then you took a risk, and you did not follow the rules of the test, which I think is a breach in integrity. I would not give it a second thought, but for the future, follow the rules.

As long as you are okay with it it’s not cheating.
If you are not so sure they it might be.

Not to mention that online translators do not translate 100% accurate. But this is something else.

The thing is that YOU need to improve your vocabulary at a foreign language it’s not the teacher job. If you only learn in class and do not practice at home you will NEVER pass the beginner stage.
Listen to music , watch cartoons and read kids books to improve yourself.
[ cartoons and kids books because they have common words and those are easy to remember and understand ]

Not in my view, but it does depend on your school’s own policy. Having said that, I don’t understand the idea that outside resources is cheating, because there will never, ever be a time in your life out of school where, should you need to write a complete French sentence, you wouldn’t be allowed to check with outside resources. Plus, what is outside resources – your parents, who are encouraged and expected to help you with homework? Your textbook? A teacher who doesn’t teach you, but does work at your school? A teacher from another school? I think the most important thing is that you learned from your “outside resource”, which you did.

Especially since you wrote the piece, then checked it, I think your analogy to a spell-check is valid and there is no cheating going on. In particular you sound like someone who will learn from what you see if there is a correction to be made, not just pass the assignment, so bravo for you.

Hehe this is funny and odd! In my country we cheat all the time and it’s widespread. Most of the time some teachers(not all of them) help us and give us the answers. Maybe it’s wrong to cheat but it’s a way to succeed especially when you are still at school, after few years you won’t remember anything from what you have learned. Excuse me for having this opinion but what you have done is not cheating at all, and if this can be useful I can teach you French,I have been a french teacher once:-)

Remember, the goal of education is to learn something, not to pass tests. If what you say is true, then you have learned your French, and you were merely checking to see if you were correct. In my opinion, that’s not cheating. But then, in my opinion, tests are cheating by teachers who are too lazy to assess their students individually under real conditions.

I don’t know why you are in school, but if you are there to learn, you didn’t cheat. If you are there to do well on tests, then you have my sincere sympathy….. not!

@wundayatta the goal of education is to learn something, not to pass tests. That’s kinda debatable, isn’t it? I can learn for cheap or free on my own, and quite a bit. I pay several thousand dollars in tuition so that a school knows that I can learn, and will give me a piece of paper that I can show to potential employers saying that the school believes in me. If that’s not the point of education, then school’s just one big rip-off, because I can buy the textbooks for much, much less money.

@wundayatta Stated it perfectly @Brie this is one other reason we chose to homescholl…our son is learning to know, not to win on a test

Ok, @MyNewtBoobs. The goal of education is to pass tests. I stand corrected.

Will someone please shoot me and put me out of my misery?

@wundayatta Sorry. I tend to get a little worked up over student loans.

@MyNewtBoobs You do have a point. When I was in grad school, they told me exactly what you said. We are here to get the piece of paper that certifies we are ready to make more money.

I’m being idealistic. Of course you are right that everything is aimed towards passing tests so that they can certify a student has “learned” something and is therefore employable. Education is a secondary concern. But just because this is true doesn’t mean we should buy into it. No one likes the system, as far as I can tell, but it is mandated by law for elementary and secondary education, so it is in the culture now.

I hate it when people are motivated by the sheepskin and not by learning. That’s what leads to cheating. If we didn’t have tests, and didn’t even require anyone to show up to class, then only the people who are motivated to learn would show up. If we evaluated people based on their real contributions instead of their ability to mimic parrots, we’d probably be far better off.

But you paid good money, so please, knock yourself out. Get that degree. You have to make money somehow, and the more money you make, the better off you will be. But if you’re going to enjoy being better off, you’ll need an actual education as well.

@wundayatta Just to clarify, I’m not knocking learning. If I didn’t think learning was important, I wouldn’t have a stack of books from my school library I’m working my way through, none of which are particularly easy reads. Nor did I ever stop reading and learning while I was out of school. I think learning is very important, and everyone who has their more basic needs met (food, shelter, water, clothing) should be doing it, no matter what point in their life they are at. My problem is with the idea that you should pay 5–40 thousand dollars a year to learn what you could learn for no more than 200 dollars. I tried the learning for the knowledge tactic in high school and ended up getting very poor grades, so poor that I can’t get into a nice state college and have to spend a couple years at a crappy college getting my grades up before transferring (which I have to do because no crappy schools have my major). Now I study for the tests and the papers, and learn in between, and I’m getting straight As.

I might have considered it cheating if you changed your answers after the translator told you it was wrong… but you said you didn’t do that.

Also, it’s an online class. The developers of the program know you are going to do this . . . so unless they made you sign something swearing you wouldn’t . . . don’t sweat it.

@MyNewtBoobs the direct cost to students for education is awful, I sympathize and wish our stupid government policies were turned back around the direction that understands what a great investment schooling/training is for the entire economy.

The analogies to spell checkers and calculators is silly. Spell check is commonly accepted because its everywhere and calculators are only allowed on certain exams and not others. An online translator is like a calculator, you can only use it when the test allows you to.

School is about learning, but its also about measuring. Your grades will be used a metric of how much you know and compared to other people’s grades. This is why cheating is, in this case, bad.

Because it didn’t end up changing your work, I wouldn’t bother to report it in or anything, but don’t do this anymore.