# That takes nerve. **URL:** \ **Category:** Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share\ **Created:** [December 6, 2002, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/that-takes-nerve/140947 "2002-12-06T16:14:40Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 3\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Podkayne](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/edb3f5/32.png) [@Podkayne](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Podkayne)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2002, 4:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/that-takes-nerve/140947/1 "2002-12-06T16:14:40Z")
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 . . . ---
**Author:** ![Forbin](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/5e9695/32.png) [@Forbin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Forbin)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2002, 5:21pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/that-takes-nerve/140947/2 "2002-12-06T17:21:04Z")
Yes, it does sound pretty audacious. If one waxes conspriritorial one can see a way in which it _could_ have worked. After all, who hasn’t been to a restaurant where the flavor of less than fresh food (fish in my particular case) was covered up (poorly) with “delicious sauce”. That’s how I see this plagarism. An attempt to trick the teacher. Pretty good effort. F ---
**Author:** ![Gravity](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gravity/32/14322_2.png) [@Gravity](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gravity)\ **Post date:** [December 6, 2002, 6:08pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/that-takes-nerve/140947/3 "2002-12-06T18:08:32Z")
I had a friend that was the investigator for ethics violations at a local university. A few years ago, she was given a case where a student had just printed out a web page, leaving the address at the bottom of the page, like some browsers print, and handed it in as her own work. For an end-of-the-year project of some sort, no less.