I seriously considered plagiarising the literature review paper I wrote on plagiarism.

 I know what you’re thinking: “Man, is she crazy?” and the answer is: Absolutely. But let me first tell you why I seriously considered it, and even bounced the idea off some of my peers and co-workers to see how they felt about my proposal.

The point is to determine whether or not increased access to the world wide web (you know.. that netting inside your swim shorts? Inter.. net.. nevermind. Bad joke.) has increased the instances of academic theft, and perhaps also if it has increased the catching of said theft more frequently because of sites like turnitin.com or whatever there is out there.

 I had never had personal experience with any sort of checking for plagiarism, until my 4^th year of university. I went to a new, technology based uni, (not like, ITT Tech or something, a legit post-secondary institution) and they were big on this turnitin.com. Which is great, the rule was – you had to submit it to the website a week before it was due, and include your printed results with the percentage of copied material. (So, like, 100% means you actually stole the entire thing.. including your name.. and the date and all the other content) and as long as the paper scored 4% or below, you were good to go. I think there were some instances where you could argue why your paper was more (quotes are caught and highlighted and included in the number, so I suppose as long as you proved it was properly cited it wouldn’t really matter) and so on. I had a good experience with it, I scored a 3 or something so I was good to go.

 My thought for this project, was that if I could get away with stealing the literature review, then I would prove a point that sure, the internet has increased my personal ability to steal something, because I had access to it via the interwebz. I haven’t plagiarised anything in a post-secondary setting before (it was never worth the risk and scorn of academia to me – I talk enough as it is, I’m sure I could produce my own work) and working with offenders in my regular life has more than proven that stealing (crime) doesn’t pay. (unless you work for the mob, in which case it does. But, I’m not allowed to tell my clients that.)

If I wasn’t caught – point proven. As someone who doesn’t plagiarise regularly, the internet certainly made it easier for me to find the information and present it as my own work. If I was caught, it would stand to prove that academia is using the same resources to catch students who are falsely presenting work as their own, as students are using to gather resources in order to falsely present said work. The issue is of course, that now I’ve plagiarised something, and had to weigh if it was worth it to argue my case so it didn’t reflect badly on me as a student (for obvious reasons.). But, the only thing I could come up with, was a secondary paper, explaining the results of my ‘theft’ and presentation of work that wasn’t mine – and that to me seemed like way more work than worth for proving a point. Especially because the review is what other people think on the subject, and not my own personal views or additions to the research. I guess without having the technology to look up my sources or wonder where it came from, how would someone know that you took work from a dusty old book in the back of a library? Unless having read or understood the presented material already, I wonder what indication there would be for an assessor to say “Oh, this is not their work.” And then prove it without knowing the work first.  

I always ask my clients: “Wouldn’t it be way more worth it to just go to work every day and earn the money yourself, instead of stealing someone’s TV and then trying to offload it?” I feel the same way about stealing research and papers and whatnot. I think we can all say we’ve considered having someone else write papers for us, not cite material, but at the end of the day: Why bother?

In the end, it didn’t end up being worth it to me to have my degree derailed because I (sometimes) think the rules don’t apply to me. But, I suppose it would have been an interesting experience, especially to see the results.