Cheater!

[shanmonster]

I just filled out a UNB survey on cheating. It was pretty straightforward, but when I got to the comments section, I felt it necessary to add my own personal experience with plagiarism, cheating, and accusations:

When I was in my second year of studies, I was registered in a third-year psychology course. I wrote an essay for the course, and when the essay was handed back, it had an "A" written in red ink at the top. The "A" was crossed out, and a "D" marked underneath, along with a note saying, "I want to discuss this with you."

Confused, I went to see the professor. He accused me of plagiarizing my paper, saying, "No second year student can write this well."

When I protested, and pointed out my copious footnotes, he told me I must have copied it from somewhere. Then he said the next paragraph wasn't written as well as the part in question.

I told him that I wasn't perfect, and that my writing may be a bit spotty, but I swore I hadn't cheated.

He said he couldn't prove I'd cheated, so he was giving me a "D" for the paper.

If I knew then what I know now, I would have reported him to the dean of students. However, I was left feeling horribly guilty for a sin I hadn't even committed. I really wish it had been made clear to me early in my academic career that there were avenues I could pursue should something like this happen. As it was, I experienced a pretty serious setback in my CGPA because of this incident.

I think what makes my experience even more bitter was that up until this incident, I really enjoyed the class and thought the instructor was just peachy. What a let-down.

Did you ever have anything like this happen to you?

Comments

[fiachra.livejournal.com]

Fortunately, no. I've had my share of teachers who were happy that I was several notches above their usual caliber of student (I started higher education in my early 20s, I had a few years of maturity on the just-graduated-high-schoolers).

[elanya.livejournal.com]

Yeah, so just so you were older, you were allowed to be smarter? Do you think you would have been treated the same had you been producing that calibre of work out of HS? I wonder. hard to say at this point, I guess.

[fiachra.livejournal.com]

Actually, most of them didn't know, since I'm a babyface. :^) A few found out later and said "Oh, that would explain it", though.

But to date, no one has ever said "You couldn't have written this."

[groovycat.livejournal.com]

no, but i -have- had people directly plagiarize papers of mine without my knowledge and turn those in... and not get caught. =/

[shanmonster.livejournal.com]

People plagiarize material from The Witching Hours all the time. Once, it even made the news because something like 2/3 of a university class used the exact same essay. Morons....

[groovycat.livejournal.com]

could you imagine being the professor for that class? hah. i wonder if s/he was amused or disgusted... hopefully a combination thereof.

NO... but I've caught a few people

[vess.livejournal.com]

I have no personal experience of doing it myself, but when I was marking labs when I was a TA, there were several cases that a couple of students had copied eachothers lab word for word... the funniest part is the one that I remember most, the lab that was copied was so bad I could barely make it through it to mark it, then the very next lab is a repeat.

Re: NO... but I've caught a few people

[balthcat.livejournal.com]

Regardless of whether it's allowed... maybe they actually all worked on it together :)

it's happened to me!!!

[(Anonymous)]

I took an accounting class in college and we had to do an assignment which was basically a long page full of debits and credits we had to figure out. My answers at the end were right, but every single number in the debit and credit columns were wrong and my teacher accused me of cheating. Even though the numbers were wrong, they somehow added up to the right answers and she didn't even check. :-(

[ninjalicious.livejournal.com]

A HS friend of mine got a failing grade and lecture from our Creative Writing teacher due to having "grammar and punctuation beyond a HS level". Of course, this is the girl we always went to to proofread our papers, because, well, she had grammar and punctuation beyond a HS level.