Look, I’m not a rulebreaker. I sign in on time, I don’t cut the line in Paresky Commons, I always print double-sided in the library. But let’s be real for a second: I could totally plagiarize if I wanted to, and no one would ever find out.
Allow me to be perfectly clear: I have not, nor will I, ever commited an act of academic dishonesty. I’m just saying, can it really be that hard? Do you know how many articles there are on JSTOR? I could rip a paragraph from one, and my teachers wouldn’t even bat an eye.
So hypothetically speaking, if I were in English-200, third period in Room 127, and I needed to know what my teacher was talking about because he or she was showing off their graduate degree instead of actually teaching us, I could just look up any one of hundreds of thematic synopses and chapter analyses and plop them right in the middle of my essay or reflection or whatever. I mean, I could be sneaky and paraphrase, but I bet I wouldn’t have to. How would they ever figure out?
Again, not condoning cheating, but the more I talk about it frankly the more offended I am by those of you who doubt my abilities. Not that I’m going to prove you wrong, just that if I wanted to show a particular not-real freshman in my math class that it wouldn’t be the end of the hypothetical world for him to give me his homework answers just once, I could.
