Double Post Day! (Plagiarism)

It's officially time for Double-Post Day, the new, trendy celebration of the slack off/catch up cycle. I may have missed a post solely due to illness, but that still counts! Therefore, in keeping with the tradition I just made up, there will be two posts today.

And now, it's time for some thoughts on plagiarism; namely, that plagiarism is very, very bad.

However, this simply won't do for a blog post, so let's extend that a bit by covering the side of reactions to academic student plagiarism not wholly developed in the readings thus far: Exactly what do the other students think of it?

There was quite a large group of kids at my high school attempting IB program courses (think of them as an international sort of AP program), myself included. There were enough of us, in fact, to fill several classes at once and develop into a sort of social community. When we caught wind of plagiarism on anything higher-level than a spelling worksheet, it was taken almost as a personal insult to the members of our group. That someone would get out of doing the very same work we were doing and receive the very credit we failed to obtain struck a very raw nerve in the lot of us. Accordingly, when a certain student who shall remain nameless found himself within reach of valedictorian status upon graduating, despite a long-documented (by students) history of plagiarism and academic cheating, we felt highly vindicated when, at the last minute, several IB course teachers inexplicably began to "lose" his plagiarised work and assess his (rather substandard) remaining work at a higher level of scrutiny than had previously been employed. What the student failed to realize was that although his peers could not punish him for his transgressions, the teachers belonged to the IB community just as much as the students and were both willing and able to hold him accountable for his misdeeds.

The student did not graduate in the top twenty of the class and is currently, we believe, busy cheating and being caught at a quite respectable ivy-league university far removed from Wisconsin.