Way back in high school, I sent an entry to the school’s literary magazine. It was a minor poem by Wordsworth. They rejected it.
How about you?
In 3rd grade I plagiarised a comic book story for a creative writing assignment. I got a B on it.
Dunno if it counts but I plagiarized myself, handing in the same basic paper on the WWI Pals Battalions for both a Western Civ class and a British History class a year or so later. Never intentionally copied someone else’s work as my own that I recall.
Edit:
Hah, that reminds me that in 3rd grade or so, I was at a cousin’s house when she pointed at a row of tomatoes and said “Attack of the Killer Tomatoes!”. I wasn’t aware it was a movie title and thought she just made it up as a funny remark and used the line as a title for a “Write your own story” assignment and got a strange look from the teacher which I didn’t understand until years later. Now it’s one of those weird cringy memories no one else gives a shit about but still haunts my psyche from time to time.
In one high school math class, we were required to write an essay about a mathematician.
I was rather annoyed, because there was no way the teacher could know if I was the author of the essay, and I hated writing. So I copied word for word an encyclopedia entry about a mathematician. The assignment passed, and as far as I was concerned, I had met the spirit of the assignment (find out about a person who did math), even if I hadn’t met the letter of the assignment.
I was an opinionated brat, I guess.
Mine was copying my own program code when I retook the same class that I had previously failed for non-attendance. I didn’t even know that was a thing until afterwards.
In 5th grade we had to draw something for art class and I was hopeless at art. So I traced this picture out of a book and turned it in. It ended up winning a prize in some contest. I was very nervous I would be caught, haha.
No. I was in a communications and humanities magnet program from 7th grade on, so I was well trained, well practiced, and quite adept at bullshitting my way through writing papers by the time I hit high school. Remained a very useful skill throughout college right through to today.
No, but I was once plagiarized. An unpublished (rejected) paper of mine was copied and published in an obscure journal. The story is too long to tell here, but I knew the plagiarizer and he knew of the paper.
I did this, too. I might have plagiarized on a birthday card.
Nope, never.
When I was in elementary, we were taught you can’t copy - you have to write in your own words. I took that to mean if the source you read used the word “automobile” it was OK to copy the sentence and put “car” instead. I never copied entire reports, but there were a few sentences that followed my understanding of “no copying.”
By the time I hit junior high, I figured out what plagiarism was and my work from then on was original. I do wonder now how closely my teachers in those early years read what I submitted. Considering how many kids were in the class (overcrowded classes of Boomers in the 60s) I wouldn’t be surprised to learn they just kinda skimmed looking for obvious spelling and punctuation errors.
You might be surprised how many people don’t know this. Furthermore, they think cutting and pasting from an article without attribution isn’t plagiarizing. I mean, What??! All words and ideas don’t belong to everybody??! :rolleyes:
I never plagiarized, but I did the reverse. In grade school, we were supposed to copy a poem out of books of children’s poetry and read them to the class. I loved poetry but thought the poems in the books were dumb, so I wrote a poem myself and pretended it was one I’d copied. It was arrogant and wrong, even though I got away with it.
The idea of self-plagiarism seems absurd to me, unless your prior work has actually been published and is citable, in which case you should absolutely cite your original work and not just include it without citation.
I mean, why SHOULDN’T you have been able to use the same paper for both assignments if it was never published? It’s not like you didn’t do the research and write the paper in either case; you just didn’t do twice the work, which shouldn’t be relevant.
I myself self-plagiarized after a fashion; I wrote a basic essay on data compression techniques as part of a freshman year computer science course, and over the course of the next 4 years, reworked it, added to it, and expanded it for probably 5 more assignments across several departments. Granted, the original paper and the final one didn’t have much relation to each other besides the bibliography, the general subject matter and a handful of paragraphs that were unchanged.
John Fogerty was once sued for allegedly plagiarizing himself. Fogerty had signed a contract where he surrendered the royalties to his early song. He later wrote a song, “The Old Man Down The Road”, which the company claimed was based on an earlier Fogerty song, “Run Through the Jungle”, which they now owned the rights to. So they said Fogerty owed them royalties for the use of his own song. (Fogerty won the case.)
No, but for one high school class I wrote a book report for a book that didn’t exist. It was long enough ago that I don’t remember any details about the “book”, except that several characters were vampires.
Never, but I was accused of plagiarism when I decided to add a couple of “big words” to one of my English essay’s in Grade 10. They were shocked that a Latin immigrant knew the word “mercurial”.
I never deliberately plagiarized anyone but myself. In business writing though, we reuse phrasing a lot. We rip off document formats from previous documents and companies. I was once told to follow a particular format and went searching for the meta data and discovered that it had originated with our biggest competitor. Oops. When I pointed it out to the company, they had me create a similar format and then everyone spent a couple of days transferring data to my new template so all the docs would not reflect the competition.
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m … and now you know what my cat thinks of plagiarism too.
I never plagiarized, but I did fake my way through some papers in college and one of the post-graduate courses I took. The college ones were book critiques. I didn’t read the books. I just picked a quote from the middle of each book and wrote the critiques around those. The other one was a research paper I had a really hard time finding enough sources for, so I listed two or three sources from one source I did find as sources in my works cited page. I got A- on each of the two critiques and a 95/100 on the research paper just because they were too short.
Most enlightening carnut’s cat. Please provide proof you didn’t just copy and paste that from something another cat already wrote. 
I’ve probably done so as a youth, I have been wrongly accused of it
She refuses to consider it until she’s had dinner and after-dinner washing. 