What to do about a plagiarized paper?

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marketer23

marketer23

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Oct 1, 2008
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I had a paper due on nuclear energy today and 30 mins before I had to hand in my paper, I found out my partner committed plagiarism on a paragraph on her half of the paper. I immediately thought she plagiarized her entire part of the paper. I was hustling to doctor the paper up as best I could, changing words here and there and rewording sentences as fast as I could. I thought about going to the teacher and telling the teacher what my partner did, but I wasn't sure if that would be the right thing to do or the smart thing to do.

After class, I called my partner and asked how much of the paper she plagiarized and she insisted she didn't plagiarize any. Obviously, she's fucking lying to me because I wouldn't make accusations if I didn't have proof.

Should I have handed in the paper? Or told the teacher that my partner plagiarized her half of the paper? Maybe if I would have opened my mouth the teacher would have failed both of us. Or maybe the teacher won't notice.

Either way it was a tough call and I just handed in the paper 2 hrs ago and walked out the door.
 


marketer23 said:
I had a paper due on nuclear energy today and 30 mins before I had to hand in my paper, I found out my partner committed plagiarism on a paragraph on her half of the paper. I immediately thought she plagiarized her entire part of the paper. I was hustling to doctor the paper up as best I could, changing words here and there and rewording sentences as fast as I could. I thought about going to the teacher and telling the teacher what my partner did, but I wasn't sure if that would be the right thing to do or the smart thing to do.

After class, I called my partner and asked how much of the paper she plagiarized and she insisted she didn't plagiarize any. Obviously, she's fucking lying to me because I wouldn't make accusations if I didn't have proof.

Should I have handed in the paper? Or told the teacher that my partner plagiarized her half of the paper? Maybe if I would have opened my mouth the teacher would have failed both of us. Or maybe the teacher won't notice.

Either way it was a tough call and I just handed in the paper 2 hrs ago and walked out the door.
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Academia is a fucking nightmare when it comes to this shit. Cover your ass, call the Dr./Prof like NOW and straighten things out. First one to rat the other out is gonna come out clean, pray your partner hasn't gotten there first.
 
That sucks, if it happened to me I would subscribe the idiot to 20-30 scat porn websites (before you ask: no, I don't know any). Anyway I understand your predicament.

If the teacher knows something about his subect he *will* know, tho. If this happens make sure you can demonstrate that was not your half (if you've done your referencing right it's not too difficult).
 
Sounds like you need to work with your partner a little closer. One gets too much power and the see-saw hits the ground and you've got no way to get it back up. If you tell the teacher, you're probably fucked. Expulsion for plagerism is common, so I'd bargain for an F if the teacher catches you.
 
kingofsp said:
Snitches get stitches.
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So he's supposed to risk the $ he paid for the class? This isn't federal pound me in the ass prison, it's a fucking university.

Someone is going to be penalized, if not both, unless he's proactive, just sayin.
 
It's only cheating if you get caught.

I had a group project once for a college psychology class, there where 4 of us working on this paper, which btw had nothing to do with psychology. Well a couple days later we come into our lab, this paper wasn't due for another week btw, and one of the guys in the group has the WHOLE paper done. We all read it over it was really good.

Everyone was happy they didn't have to spend any time writing the piece of shit. We where a pretty tight knit group of guys as not many people make it too far into our program, so it was basically hand claps all around.

The paper was about dyes in food, again had nothing to do with psychology. So he prints it up and turns it in for us, we never though anything about it - wasn't the first time we had done something like that.

Wouldn't you know it, we all get called to the professors office after class and she questions the shit out of us. She knew it was plagiarized straight up. Not because it was wrote too well mind you, but because some how the fucker that wrote it had all the web-links from the FDA website he copied it from on the paper! *face palm*

We could have been expelled, but we really had no idea what he just did. We luckily where able to redo the assignment and take a 0 rather than be expelled. But man we could have been axed [not that I would have cared, my parents whom payed for my schooling sure as hell would have].

If it's one paragraph, ffffsh big fucking deal. If that brings you down your professor is hard core.
 
I've seen people get popped buying from paper mills; not because of the content, but all the meta info in the word doc like created by, revisions, etc.

Ten years ago, they might have given you crap about it, but nowadays they will put you out on the street and not think twice about it. All these schools share info thru places like turnitin and before they kick you out, they will put a note in your transcript so it is that much harder to get into another school.

On the other hand, if your instructor runs a lot of papers thru turnitin and the other half is not word-for-word, it may be unique enough to fall below the threshold (8-13% is normal, 25% or greater usually gets a second look).

Also, this is the kind of question you should ask the instructor at the beginning of the semester; then it will be much more clear what you should do.
 
If you're going to copy, you best be Copy-n-pasting the document into notepad and saving it as a TXT first to get rid of any meta-data.
Wordpad if you need to keep bullet points, and save it as an RTF.

THEN you article wrangle, and put THAT into Word.

Not that I did that. I actually enjoyed researching and writing my assignments because I like to learn new things. But it always helps to know if you simply run out of time and have to pull a swifty.
 
bb_wolfe said:
So he's supposed to risk the $ he paid for the class? This isn't federal pound me in the ass prison, it's a fucking university.

Someone is going to be penalized, if not both, unless he's proactive, just sayin.
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Look, I've been waiting for a thread to come along and give me the opportunity to say "snitches get stitches" for a long time, and you're not going to take it away from me!

PS I've been watching a lot of Lock Up.
 
marketer23 said:
I had a paper due on nuclear energy today and 30 mins before I had to hand in my paper, I found out my partner committed plagiarism on a paragraph on her half of the paper. I immediately thought she plagiarized her entire part of the paper. I was hustling to doctor the paper up as best I could, changing words here and there and rewording sentences as fast as I could. I thought about going to the teacher and telling the teacher what my partner did, but I wasn't sure if that would be the right thing to do or the smart thing to do.

After class, I called my partner and asked how much of the paper she plagiarized and she insisted she didn't plagiarize any. Obviously, she's fucking lying to me because I wouldn't make accusations if I didn't have proof.

Should I have handed in the paper? Or told the teacher that my partner plagiarized her half of the paper? Maybe if I would have opened my mouth the teacher would have failed both of us. Or maybe the teacher won't notice.

Either way it was a tough call and I just handed in the paper 2 hrs ago and walked out the door.
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This is why I hate group projects... too many fuck ups in school. I would report that shit. Pretty sure there is a website teachers can check if anything is plagiarized pretty easily. Don't risk it.
 
Definitely rat them out, especially since they were being an asshole about it and lying to your face. You can't know if they'll blame you, take their ass out.
 
kingofsp said:
Look, I've been waiting for a thread to come along and give me the opportunity to say "snitches get stitches" for a long time, and you're not going to take it away from me!

PS I've been watching a lot of Lock Up.
Click to expand...

I apologize, I'm a goat! Agreed. Snitches get stiches!
 
xmcp123 said:
Keep the copy of your half. Don't say shit and just show the original of your (non plagiarized) part if it comes up. Last modified dates rock(even though they can be faked)
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Agreed. Don't rat them out, but definitely be prepared to defend yourself when/if it comes up. Also let your partner know that you know what she knows and that she knows that she cheated and you know that. Then let her know that if you and her get partnered up again, you'll be willing to actually rat her out that time. She gets a more than fair warning.
 
FOLLOW UP: I read what all of you posted and I decided it was best for me to do nothing. I saved all the emails just in case the teacher found out.

Our grades for the paper just got posted via BlackBoard. We didn't get caught plagiarizing. We got a 133 out of a possible 200 points on the paper.
 
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