Wholly-original work
Until, of course, you put your name on it. Diana Senechal found this odd little promise (doesn’t look like a warranty, in legal terms) being offered by a vendor of term papers:
Accepted Papers guarantees the following:
- 0% plagiarism
- No cut-paste material
- No bogus citations
- Your term papers will not [be] found in any databaseZero percent plagiarism! Shouldn’t Accepted Papers be legally required to disclose that it is plagiarism to turn in someone else’s essay as one’s own?
Me, I’m wondering about those “bogus citations,” and the difficulty of making them look plausible while still keeping the cost low enough to appeal to the starving student with both an impaired sense of propriety and a shortage of time to make up his own bogus citations.
Then again, I once wrote a paper for a physics class that was 80 percent Beckettesque dialogue, so my expertise in this realm is easily open to challenge.
McGehee »
20 September 2009 · 10:23 am
I once submitted a paper on leadership that was nothing but a short story (written by me of course). Got a good grade too.
fillyjonk »
20 September 2009 · 4:56 pm
Oh. Dear. Lord.
This almost makes me wish students would just e-mail the fake “corrupted” files that another website offers. (How can they call it “0 percent plagiarism”? Isn’t the fact that the student is submitting a paper they did not write changing that to at least 50% plagiarism? I mean, it’s 0% when the paper is offered but 100% on the part of the student when they hand it in, claiming it’s their own work, and the average of those two numbers is 50%, no?)
I admit to being a joyless harridan about this sort of thing but I had a student who REPEATED my class and who plagiarized again the second time he took it. The only thing he said to me after the second was, “I didn’t think you’d check.” Um, yeah. That might be part of why you’re retaking the class?