12 Plagiarism

Plagiarism is the use of someone else’s words whether we use them in whole or paraphrase them without giving credit. I had an e-class in American Government where the students had to respond 12 assignments plus discussions. All the assignments were well-done. The last assignment did him when I began to read it. I agreed with all its opinions. I loved it. Only problem was that it was taken off my website!

I then began to Google all his other works as well which revealed extensive plagiarism. Obviously, answering homework questions involved repeating the text. The problem was the sections that the opinion questions which were suppose to reflect his personal thoughts. I began to re-evaluate the assignments which fell from getting a grade of 90% to 120% to 20% to 80%.

Amir began to frantically e-mail me as he saw his grades change to failing. He could not write a single sentence without a grammatical or spelling error. I should have realized that he was not a master of the English language because he had never taken part in a discussion question which would have required some mastery of prose writing. Unlike some well-known plagiarists who claim they forget to put in quotation marks or they incorporated dozens of pages into their epics because of some computer mix-up, he did not make such claims. Instead, he said he needed a B so that his company would pay for the course. When this did not work, he said needed a passing grade to graduate. When this did not work, he protested to my supervisor who said he could come in person to take a comprehensive test to demonstrate his mastery of the subject. Although he made several appointments, he never showed up for the examination. I guess he hoped to wear people down in passing him but this did not work. Other professors have reported students using their old journal articles or books or e-data that they claim they did original research and writing. These are truly dumb clucks not to recognize the names of professors!