Dang me!
(:))
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 3rd grader knew how to use the word “briefly” correctly in a sentence.
:D:D
In high school, I once handed in an essay where the first paragraph was a straight up rip-off of something an older friend of mine wrote. I didn’t realize he’d published it. And my teacher, a contemporary of my older friend, really had it out for me. When he found out and reported me, I nearly got expelled.
People pay for having their work written. Plagiarism may be frowned upon but it has become such a booming business that it resembles a pandemic.
An infinite number of cats sitting on an infinite number of keyboards will eventually plagiarize the complete works of Shakespeare.
I’ve written fan fiction. Does that count?
That was my thought although, at the time, I wasn’t thinking of it that way and more “Hey, I can breeze through this assignment”.
These days, where instructors run papers through internet services to check for plagiarism and those papers are stored in the database to check against future papers, I would assume that using the same paper twice would be a recipe for trouble. But those days are long behind me so maybe it’s still done.
In an American literature class, an assignment was to read The Great Gatsby then do a book report. My book report was a satire straight from the pages of Mad magazine. Their satire was The Great Fatsby. Other that some name changes and a few new plot twists, my book report followed the Mad version. The teacher, in his first year of being a teacher, loved it and gave me an A. This was a start of me cruising through a class I thought I would struggle at.
Sure. I was a lazy student, and back in the days before the internet there was a good chance you wouldn’t get caught.
We had to write a long research paper during my senior year in high school. I kept putting it off until just days before it was due and realized that there was no way I could do it at that point. I somehow convinced a friend to give me a copy of her paper. I retyped it, changing words here and there, and turned it in. I’m sure the teacher knew what I had done but he let me get away with it.
I did something like this exactly once, as well. Got away with it, too. My friend actually thought it was hilarious that I got away with it and didn’t seem to be at all miffed at me for doing so, but, in the years since, I have felt some pangs of guilt for doing it.
I also once got accused of plagiarism for an in-class assignment in fourth grade. We had to write a poem or something, so I wrote one based on the seasons. Started something like “The sky in the morning is bright and blue/and the grass is filled with watery dew/the birds chirp and sing all day/and the flowers bloom in the month of May” and then it goes on to summer, fall, and winter. Teacher originally gave me an A+, then crossed it out with an F, for some reason thinking I copied it. No idea why, as it was an in-class assignment. My parents, surprisingly, actually called up the teacher (the only time I ever remember my parents talking to the school on their own initiative) and the teacher backed off and gave me my A.
I’ve never plagiarized, unless you count my occasional Dave Barry quote in these forums, in which I sometimes don’t give him credit.
But I do remember a story I wrote for a literature class in first year university. It was about a distant civilization that was soon to be consumed by the supernova explosion of their sun. It was a sci-fi story that dealt with a civilization that knew its end was near. In Arthur C. Clarke’s story The Star, which I don’t think I was even aware of at the time, artifacts of the civilization were discovered long after the fact; mine was about their current world. As the supernova exploded at the end of the story, my story revealed the surprise twist that the light from this cataclysm eventually appears on earth as the Star of Bethlehem, with all the moral implications left unsaid.
What I will always remember is that the grade I got was downgraded for that last bit which I thought was the whole freaking point of the story (struck down from A+ to A, or A to A-, whatever). Whatever doofus teaching assistant was marking these first-year papers wrote on mine, “terrific story – too bad the ending spoils it”. Yeah, the ending that my story shared with Arthur C. Clarke. :rolleyes:
You have an amazing career ahead of you in politics. 
Yes, All through High School and College.
I’ve always had a hard time writing. I had a lot of ideas but couldn’t get started and I couldn’t keep those ideas organized. I would find something I liked and mimic the voice and organization then change everything to be relevant to my assignment. By the time I was done it was probably 90% my own work but having the structure helped a lot. I’m lucky I was born before the age of Google. I’m also lucky that almost all of the writing I do/did in my career has been taking an existing document and mimicking the voice and organization and change everything to be relevant to my project, only now it’s probably only 50% my own work.
You misinterpret my meaning. I’m a great fan of Dave Barry and always gratefully credit any significant quotes to him, sometimes citing the book that they came from, too. It’s just that I’ll sometimes use a throwaway phrase like “ethics of a nocturnal rodent” without mentioning that Dave Barry invented that (first applied, I believe, to Richard Nixon). 
Can’t think of any. The closest I can come up with is a piece of music I wrote that, years later, I decided had been heavily influenced in its chord-change pattern by a piece of contemporary pop I’d grown up hearing. But I’d at least done different things with the rhythm.
I love that!
I’d be very surprised if all this wasn’t true for a very high percentage of grade schoolers. I imagine it’s considered acceptable since there is no way a teacher wouldn’t be able to see you were doing that very thing.
The only time I can recall deliberately plagiarising something was in 7th grade when our “flaky” teacher had us write a poem and a bunch of us who thought we were cool wrote down snippets of rock songs. I used part of Led Zeppelin’s All of My Love.
STupid thing to do not only because it’s wrong but because I was actually good at writing poetry :smack:
I would have said no, but in college I took a research paper I wrote for one class and reworked it for another (though it was still probably about 75% identical), and reused it a third time by turning it into a presentation for a speech class.
I didn’t know that self-plagiarism was a thing, I thought that was just being efficient. 
Nope. Never done it. Wouldn’t think of doing it.
I’ve been on the other end. For example, a textbook came out that took the first paragraph of a paper I wrote and basically changed the “in this paper” type statements to “in that paper” and nothing more.
I contacted the publisher of the journal my paper appeared in and soon there was a 2nd printing with the paragraph substantially re-written. One wonders how many other paragraphs in the text had this problem.
Back in the Bronze Age of the web, I had a website about angels (hierarchies, famous named angels from extra-Biblical sources, etc) that was pretty well traveled. Ranked high on web searches and got a number of visits and email inquiries and guestbook signatures. One day, I found that someone had copied the entire site, down to the typos, on their own page with no attribution. I contacted her and she angrily denied any such thing and then accused me of copying her.
The site was just a vanity project and the only things at stake were morality and pride. Between that, the sheer absurdity of someone stealing a website about angels and just being sort of over updating it, I didn’t bother trying to do anything about it (limited as my options were anyway) and just let my site go into maintenance mode until I switched ISPs and it got closed. These days everyone goes to Wikipedia anyway.