Plagiarism

                Plagiarism is not a thing to be taken lightly.  This one word could be the end of your academic future and success.  Cheating is another form of plagiarism, but plagiarism sounds worse.  I have dealt with two cases of a student plagiarizing in my academic career.  I was not the student who did that thankfully. 
                Of course there a lot more incidents of plagiarism, but no one ever got caught or the teacher just didn’t notice or care.  The first time that a student got in serious trouble was when I was in 10^th grade language arts class.  We were doing a research paper on the subject of a book of our choosing.  It was about a five page research paper with sited sources and the whole shebang. One student was so lazy that they bought their essay of the internet and turned it in.  The teacher noticed how advanced the writing was and ended up finding that same essay online.  It was a terrible incident!  The teacher then though every plagiarized and she typed everyone’s essay into a plagiarism search engine and found a few more people who had just copied and pasted stuff.  She accused half of the students of plagiarizing and she brought in administration.  That essay was graded out of 200 so that the people who plagiarized got a zero on that and failed her class.  That just goes to show that plagiarism is not taken lightly. 
                Another incident was this year in my AP Chemistry class and we were working on lab reports in partners.  One student was accused of plagiarism because he had the same exact thing as his partner.  It was really stupid because everyone worked in pairs and should then technically have the same exact thing, but the teacher was determined that student had plagiarized.  Both students got in trouble for no reason because the evidence she found was inaccurate.  Administration was contacted and one student was going to get suspended.  The student was tired of putting up with the false accusations so he stopped showing up to class and filled out a drop form.  That teacher was way out of hand and the student for sure didn’t plagiarize because every partner in a group should have the same answer.  That student was a senior and it would have been recorded in his school records, but thankfully him and his parents fought back and showed that the teacher was wrong.
                Plagiarism is a strong word and unless a person knows for sure if someone has done it, they should not use that word so freely.  Plagiarism and copying someone else’s work is still a major problem in schools and even in work environments.  This article discusses exactly what plagiarism is and how it is handled on different levels.