The internet is our campus

Summer semester is finally over and now the grading begins. I went to lunch with a friend from the department who told me a great story.

Last semester in his World History course he assigned a final paper analyzing the novel 'Gulliver's Travels' as a historical source. When he began grading the papers, he noticed that three separate students submitted the exact same paper, word for word.

So he goes into class the next day and announces, without providing any specific details, that he has caught several students cheating. He offers a amnesty period for any student who comes to his office and confesses their crimes. They will still be penalized, but can avoid failing the course or being referred to the Ministry of Character Development.

Two interesting things happened...

First, instead of three students, he had over a dozen people (from a class of 150) come to his office to talk about their papers. This included people who admitted plagiarism, other worried they hadn't properly cited their work, and a variety of other concerns.

Second, the Gang of Three did put in an appearance. My friend interrogated each of them, certain that one person had actually written the paper and then shared it with his two buddies.

He was surprised to learn that the three students had not collaborated with each other. In fact, they had never met before.

But they did have one thing in common - they each decided individually to purchase a paper on Gulliver's Travels from the internet.

Gulliver's Travels is a very common book for this type of assignment, and there are probably hundreds of papers you can buy from various websites. These three bobbleheads just typed the title into google, then bought their paper from the very first website that popped up.

Let this be a lesson to all of you. If you're going to cheat on a term paper, at least take the time to re-type it using your own words.