A True Case of Accidental Plagiarism
One college semester, long ago, I had an English class that ended with one very unfortunate event. It left me accused for something that I did not intend to do, forever changing the way I approach my written works.
Back then, it took me up to 2 1/2 hours of travel time to get to school, and 2 1/2 hours to return home. I did this every day, and so I didn’t have much time to relax when I got home. Think about it, I left home – it was dark out. I get home, dark – the only sunlight I saw was during my breaks at school. I’ll likely focus on my transport stories in another post – it’s a fascinating tale in itself; however, I mention it now because it meant my focus was largely on my core Computer Science classes. Knowing I was quite good in English, I decided I could put it on the back burner for the start of the semester, knowing that there was one big, valuable assignment at the end. As long as I did well on that, I knew my mark would be pretty good. I trusted my skill with the English language, I was sure I could pull this off.
Eventually, I approached the date where the big assignment had to be handed in. I was busy with other classes, and couldn’t devote time to the English assignment until the last three days before it was due. Though I was running out of time, I knew I would succeed – so I planned my last three days:
- Day 1: Finish reading the material, and take notes of areas I want to reference in my paper.
- Day 2: Complete rough draft.
- Day 3: Polish and refine until I have a final version.
It was a lot of work, but I knew I could pull it off – and I did, with one unfortunate detail.
Photo by Tim Riley
While finalizing my rough draft, I found I was missing a section of text that would allow two paragraphs to flow properly. Looking for ideas, I did something I never did before – I used Google to locate similar papers written by others. My intention was to see if anyone else focused on the same points as me, and if they did, how they structured their points. I eventually found what I was looking for – a crucial 3-4 sentences that would perfect the flow of my paper, most of which was taken up by a quote from the book. I copied this text into my rough draft, with the intention of removing it later, and instead writing my own text that covered a similar set of points. This was a fatal mistake – given how much work I had to do, I ended up being so absorbed in the paper that I forgot about the sentences from the external source. When I reached the end of the 3 days, I was pleased with what I managed to achieve – it was a lot of content to produce in three days. I handed my work in the next day, and waited for my marks.
A few days later, our English teacher published her schedule for giving us our papers back – she wanted to meet with each of us. When I went into the classroom, shutting the door behind me, I was expecting to hear mostly positive remarks, but instead, I was told I got 0%. ZERO. PERCENT. She told me it was due to plagiarism, and at first, I was completely stunned – I would never plagiarize… it’s completely against my moral code. Then, it hit me. The external text – I completely forgot to change it. Shocked, I explained the situation to the teacher, but she then replied asking me if that was true, why did I change the page numbers in the (accidentally) plagiarized portion?
Photo by James F Clay
I had a good answer to that, and it was related to the fact that I spent time with a particular individual while in English class. We’ll call him Fred. Fred was fun to hang around with, but it was pretty obvious he was a into the marijuana. I was never into that stuff, but I wasn’t one to alienate people because they had such habits. So, given all our other classes were together, I usually sat with him. Unfortunately for me, I’m convinced that factor played a huge part in my 0%. You see, Fred wasn’t the taking English very seriously, though he was aiming to finish his most valuable assignments, like me. He called me as I was working on my paper – and I provided him with some of my quotes. Just quotes from the book – that, unbeknown to me, had wrong page numbers, because I found some of them online. He later called me back to warn me about this, and so I proceeded to correct the page numbers, so that they were all valid according to my physical copy of the book. Since the forgotten text also had a quote, I corrected it along with the others – unknowingly making it seem like I was trying to cover something up. I later found out that Fred got 0% too, also for plagiarism. I didn’t know the details, but knew that I only gave him quotes from the book, nothing by another author. Regardless of his reason, it really looked bad next to me – considering I had shared with him some of my quotes.
Despite my attempts to explain this to the teacher, she didn’t believe me. It didn’t matter to her that only 3-4 sentences were accidentally plagiarized, even though it was a tiny percentage compared to the overall content I wrote. I remember clearly asking her – considering the ratio, why would I plagiarize? If I need 4 sentences, I’ll write them – that’s nothing compared to the size of the whole paper. It doesn’t make sense that anyone would plagiarize in that scenario. She still refused to budge from her mark of 0%, dismissing what I considered to be a rational, logical argument. Then again, I was really unlucky – the circumstances were aligned against me:
- I was friends with Fred, who really didn’t come off as mature, and who actually plagiarized in the end.
- I corrected the page numbers in the quotes, one of which just-so-happened to be in the accidentally plagiarized text.
- I didn’t do much work up until that point, so the teacher probably assumed I was slacker/irresponsible by nature.
Photo by Luigi Caterino
I tried taking it higher up within the college, but eventually decided to end the frustration. The higher ups told me the incident would be seen as a fluke if nothing else happened in my further education. I decided to leave it at that, but to this day I feel anger and frustration when I think about it. Nothing is worse than being accused of something you would never do. When you try to tell the truth, no one believes you – might as well have been trying to convince someone from a jail cell. I had to drop the English class at that point, as the assignment was too important – my chances of passing were almost impossible. Had I tried to pass English, I would have had to spend much more time on it – and to get what… a mere 60%. It didn’t see the point.
So, as you can imagine, this changed my views on a lot of things. The most obvious: now whenever I temporarily copy external text into a document, I make it bold, size 20, and red. That way, there’s no chance I can mistake it for my own content. I’m also more cautious about who I associate with.
Not Just Another Passenger
When I was 17, I remember accompanying my father to check out some of the local garage sales. You see, in my hometown (and likely in other towns too), we had yearly garage sale “festivals”. This is what my father jokingly called them – there would always be plenty of people at these things. I would later wonder how effective these people would have been if they had actually used their numbers to support a cause, rather than their own personal desire to acquire material goods, at a bargain; however, on this particular day, I was just looking for cool stuff. On this day, I only bought one item. This item was a 3 foot tall, 3 foot wide – bear. A giant, stuffed bear.
Kept for comedic potential
So next thing you know, we’re heading back home – and every now and then, you see people looking at us weird. Picture this… a grown man was driving a car, my father, in fact – but seated next to him – was a giant bear. My idea. We were to pick up my mother, and I figured the bear would look pretty funny sitting in the front passenger seat. Just seeing people’s expressions, and ultimately, my mother’s reaction – made the price of 20$ all worthwhile.
So… let me just confirm what you’ve all been thinking. No. I’m not a regular guy – I’m a fan of weird and quirky things, especially if it ultimately will make me laugh. If others laugh, that’s just icing on the cake.
For example, I started working as a software developer, full-time, in February 2006. After about 4 months, I decided to spice up my desk a little bit. It was just so regular, so dull. It all started with a couple stress balls – you know, those squeezable, colorful balls with printed smiley faces on them? Something you’d see over at Google. Now, my buying these balls had nothing to do with stress – I didn’t need to take out my anger on small, smiling faces – I didn’t need to crush them to feel better. I just always appreciated the “Google culture”, to an extent. A few months later, I had enough stress balls to fill the majority of my desk’s filing drawer. My desk was packed with them, and I made sure to buy some for my co-workers. It reached a point where people were buying me stress balls of all sorts, to further my collection. Some of the weirder ones I was given were ones intended for use on Halloween. I’m talking balls meant to look like eyes, skulls, or worse.
A small fraction of the stressballs I accumulated
At this point in time, since I moved to another office, most of my desk toys have been retired to my drawers, rather than remaining on my desk. I kept some around, though. They are true to my sense of humor, and my playful nature. Even so, these days, some of my co-workers will randomly find an foreign stress ball grinning at them when they arrive in the morning. I’ll just randomly do that… it makes people laugh, and laughter is a great thing. For now… I feel I’ve mastered the toy desk – my next goal is to master the plant desk – my new office has windows. I want to make myself a little jungle. Want to talk to me? Bring a machete. Unfortunately, I have yet to buy plants for work. This is mainly because I usually buy big, leafy plants – and I’m currently not too enthusiastic about exposing them this weather (during transport).
I’ve got other similar, smaller experiments going on in my apartment. First, I currently have a fake skull in one of my kitchen cupboards. If it detects motion, its eyes start to glow, and it talks. You can also turn off the motion detect, and have it only turn on manually. It usually says something really corny, and then it laughs all evil-like. It was meant to be used as a typical Halloween prop. My original idea was to keep it in the cupboard, and when people were over, act like nothing was strange about it. One time, after having it on motion detect for a while, I went to get a bowl, and I momentarily forgot it was there. It startled me – I jumped, had a good laugh, and turned off the motion detect. I have yet to get any more good laughs out of the skull, but I’ll think of something eventually.
My second apartment experiment involves my medicine cabinet. It goes something like this: when someone uses your bathroom, they technically have full access to your cabinet. You can’t really stop them – they’re using the bathroom – they have privacy. If you have any embarrassing diseases, conditions, etc – your medication and ointments – they are usually here. I’ve heard of a study that claims most people will, in fact, snoop in your medicine cabinet. Knowing this, I began to think about how I could exploit it. I thought: what if I were to put some really strange stuff in there? A rubber ducky. Binoculars. You know, just something completely out of place, or overwhelmingly embarrassing (by intention). I have yet to do anything for this one, but I have more ideas in mind.
This post was initially published on March 15, 2008.