Sound Off: Plagiarism

Ambling into class, you nearly fall into your chair. Your knees buckle from sheer exhaustion, but you feel a hint of relief as the assignment is complete! Hopefully the teacher will see how you poured pieces of yourself into the writing and how within each sentence lays a piece of your soul. With a self-satisfied smile, you turn to the student beside you and ask: “Did you finish the assignment?” She (or he) nods slightly and explains how she found it rather easy, and finished it within a few hours. “How on earth did you get it done in a ‘few hours’?” you ask incredulously. “I was working on it almost all night!”

She shrugs and replies, “Oh you know, I found a website where someone had already written a paper on it. I just edited it a bit and changed a few words.”

That is the moment when you wish that you could take the pen and stab it into your heart, for that would be easier to bear than what comes a few days later...

Her paper lands in her hands and a smug smile spreads across her face. “What did you get?” she asks. You mumble your mark and she gives you an insincere congratulations. Wincing, you ask about her mark. She scores higher than you. She who sat and clicked “copy” and “paste,” checked a few words using an online thesaurus just to add her “own touch” and that “extra bit of flair.” If she really wanted to add her “own touch,” then why didn’t she write it herself?

I despise how on occasion these students slip under the teacher’s radar. Their writing miraculously improves overnight from a shaky high-school student’s voice to the voice of a scholar; from a writer betraying two years of high school to a writer whose work suggests at least a few years of university or even a profession in critical writing. I loathe the fact that you can sit and pour over a computer for innumerable hours, attempting to grasp the words that die upon your keyboard; meanwhile, some students just visit a website or read critical essays from some obscure e-book and retype it.

It is theft, it is the stealing of another person’s ideas and words - just because you put your name above them, it doesn’t mean that those words are yours. Plagiarism reveals an incredible lack of moral integrity.