Why it’s a bad idea to turn in papers you found on the internet 0
In my last post, I said I was searching around to try to figure out what to write about. I finished that paper yesterday after like six hours – it was particularly torturous. I was frustrated and had read through all my rss feeds (Google Reader is my very favorite procrastination tool) and had randomly surfed flickr for a while when I remembered the lovely Yahoo! Answers video and gave my search results a closer look (as in I clicked on the stupidest-looking links). This one’s particularly awesome. It’s from a free essay site, and the person who wrote it has apparently never read Hamlet: he doesn’t even get Claudius’s name right, and he makes that known in the title! Here’s a sample:
Imagine: A lazy undergrad (we’ll call him Education Major) can’t find the time to read Hamlet because of all of his Education Major-y plans. So he searches the internet for a paper. He knows that SchoolSucks (remember that?) isn’t a good idea because he got caught using that one when he was in high school. His mummy hasn’t put money in his bank account yet, so there’s no way he can afford to pay for an essay (check out this one on plagiarism!). He’s desperate and not too smart. So he types in Hamlet and rhetoric or the like. It’s the first free essay listed – about the fifth result down the first page, so it must be good! The funny thing is that after he turns it in, the professor will probably think it’s fishy because it’s so much better than what he usually does.
I go to a university where, instead of making students buy something useful like the MLA Handbook, students must buy a book (okay, well, I didn’t) called something like Avoiding Plagiarism. If you’re in college and don’t know what plagiarism is, or you have a hard time figuring out if you’re copying someone else’s work, you probably shouldn’t be in college. There, I said it. Poor Education Major is probably better of learning a trade. Like welding.
Back in the day, I graded papers under the table for a professor. She had assigned a short essay on The Great Gatsby to her 200-ish level students, very few (quite possibly none) of which were English majors. I had so much fun grading these papers: at least half the class cut and pasted their papers from one website. Yes. One. It was fantastic – I slapped so many huge, red Fs on those papers. Those students better be glad I wasn’t the professor – their asses would have been reported. The actual professor just gave them the Fs, which disappointed me.
That’s one of my fondest undergrad memories.
Anyway. Let this be a warning to the Education Majors of the world: don’t be that retarded. Professors can be stupid, but not that stupid – and they’re usually really smart. Or, at least, if you do insist on plagiarising, get the characters’ names right. Is that asking too much?
