My+Story

Programing and Paying

Throughout high school I had very few problems with plagiarism. In my personal experience I have never been in trouble for plagiarism. All through my schooling all of my English teachers pressed the ideas of watching your phrasing, being very cautious of citing correctly, and to always give things your own twist. Many of my teachers used programs to help find out of students were plagiarizing. My teachers would upload our words documents to this program and then this program would scan the work and compare it to articles and books it found on the Internet. The program would then spit out a percentage of what it found “more then just similar”. It would highlight some things yellow, meaning it found other things with almost the same idea just jumbled. It would also highlight some things red, meaning it was almost directly taken from another source. It would also give the teacher the source so they could manually check it to make sure it wasn’t a program error. This program not only scared kids, but encouraged us to learn a valid way of taking in information and spitting it out with our own observations and understanding. This even helped us sometimes when we would do first drafts of writing and then our teacher would give us a second chance to improve change and better our work, ensuring that we would have no problem thinking there was any plagiarism. One instance in which I saw a great display of plagiarism was in my senior English class. We were reading the book //A Long Way Gone.// There were many kids in my class who, as second semester seniors, seem to have no energy to actually read the book. They spent their time rather reading short paragraph summaries and talking to other students in hopes that this would prepare them for the reading quiz that would likely come on the day the reading was due. This short cut may have worked for a few chapter quizzes although by the time we got to the end of the book we were surprised to have a final essay instead of a cumulative test. Many of my peers began to scramble in hopes of being able to throw together a semi plausible essay. Some succeeded and some just came to terms with the fact that they would not be able to pass it off as if they had read it, or that they were going to have to pull a few all nighters to read the entire book and craft the essay. One of my friends didn’t think any of these options sounded very reasonable. He decided to go online in search of a prewritten essay that he could purchase. There are many websites that advertise “Buying essays”. These are pre written essays on all different kinds of popular books. You can purchase them for any amount from 10-30 dollars depending on what kind of grade you are expecting. So, He bought an A paper. He printed it off and submitted in class a few days later. Shortly after he was asked to come in and meet with my teacher who asked him if it was his original work, and by this point there was really no way out, and he decided honestly was probably the best policy here. The teacher thanked him for his honesty and said the only reason he noticed was because a graduated senior had turned in the same word for word paper the year before. He gave him a warning and asked him to re write the paper if he wanted any kind of credit, and so he did. This is one of the best-case scenario stories when it comes to plagiarism and in almost any other case it would be taken much more seriously.