A friend of mine is grading for an essay class, and discovered that one of his students plagairized large parts of her last assignment. That’s not particularly unusual. One typically nets two or three plagiarists per semester in class like that.
Mostly they just claim, lookin’ all wide-eyed and sincere and innocent, that they had no idea it was wrong to copy someone else’s work verbatim without putting it in quotes and citing the source. Whether they’re actually dumb as a brick, or just trying to put one over on you, you yell at them a lot and give 'em a D or F on the paper, and generally put the fear of the academic integrity commitee in 'em, and they go forth and sin no more (at least not in your class.)
But this particular example was just precious. The student copied one paragraph verbitim from a webpage. Again, typical. The ability to cut and paste is just too great a temptation for some persons of stunted intellect and inferior character. The beauty part, though, is that she put the last sentence of the paragraph in quotation marks, and cited the webpage as the source of the quote.
Fabulous, isn’t it? I mean, a clever move like that might have slid that paragraph under the radar (provided that the grader wasn’t very bright) but since she’s been caught, this little maneuver proves that she knew she was cheating, and was trying to make it look good.
Oh, to be a fly on the wall when she has to meet with the professor. It does my old heart good to see a cheater twist in the wind . . .