With finals coming up, the pressure to produce work and to produce it fast is always on. You may feel like you will never get by with all the homework and papers and research projects that you have due in the next couple of weeks.
You may feel like you should take the easy way out and cheat, but you must resist that urge.
I want to tell a story. A short time ago, I was taking a creative writing course at CNM (which in those days was TVI, a vastly cooler set of initials). This was a workshop class where we would read a story from one of our peers, and then we would offer our own often-not-very-helpful advice on how to improve the story.
On this particular day we were reading a story from one of our classmates who had written, not so much a story, but a single character launching a diatribe about the government.
The story would have been fine if the diatribe weren’t pieced together from the collected routines of Bill Hicks, a comedian who died in 1994 and with whom I am very familiar, because I love his stuff.
Bill Hicks isn’t very well-known. He is considered in some circles to be the “Messiah of Comedy,” but outside these circles he doesn’t have a lot of name recognition. He certainly didn’t in this class, and when the critiques from the students came in, everybody had something great to say. They loved it, and why wouldn’t they? It was Bill Hicks they liked.
This fellow basked in the glory of non-creation, and I could see him rolling in it like he was some sort of unspeakable cat who had found a salt pan made entirely of catnip and lard. We went around the circle heaping praise, and finally it was my turn.
“Are you familiar with the comedian Bill Hicks?” I asked.
I saw his face fall. His entire expression lowered, and I could see shock that he’d been found out as he mumbled, “Maybe.”
I realized that he’d never do this again, but if I continued on my planned trajectory of denouncement he’d be flayed alive by the teacher and probably by the school, too. So I let it slide. I made some trivial comment about the grammar and let it pass. But he knew, and I knew.
Don’t plagiarize.
This close to finals, you may feel that you can get away with it or that you just don’t have time to do the work yourself. You may be tempted to lower the academic integrity of your entire department.
Get content from The Daily Lobo delivered to your inbox
But even if it isn’t from a well-known source, somebody has read the original source material, and they will notice. If you’ve published your thievery, you’re screwed.
“How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life” is a good example of this. The author of Opal stole most of it from another book. Unfortunately for her, people noticed. All copies of the book in the publisher’s possession were destroyed. I don’t want to compare her to Lady Macbeth, but the author has a stain on her reputation that can’t be easily washed off.
You risk your college career, and you make your department look bad.
So don’t do it, because the risks are too great, and somebody always knows.
