Firstly, I’d like to apologize for being M.I.A this past week. It was hectic and more is still come. For the next two weeks, I have assignments, projects and presentations to do, meaning I would be more scarce. But I have a great news. I decided to join the POPSUGAR 2015 READING CHALLENGE. I’m very excited about this.
I don’t know if I am going to be able to read all 52 books but I do know that I’ve covered half of the challenge. I should be posting my progress sometime this coming week.
PLAGIARISM
The past two weeks I have been fretting over my law group assignment. I was fretting because I’m one of the biggest procrastinators known to mankind. It was important to stress myself so that I could get my contribution done. I even pressured my group members to get done so that we cannot have those last-minute disasters where your printer doesn’t have ink, the printing place is closed and the uni printers suddenly go offline, just to name a few. Those last-minute disasters are REAL.
But NOTHING. And I mean NOTHING could have prepared me for the biggest poop disasters that took place.
Let me retract a bit. This group assignment was due on Tuesday, from 10 AM to 4 PM. And I remember making my group members stay on Monday morning so that we can put the assignment together and print the work in the afternoon. But as you can guess, there were laggers. Every group has one, if not a few. And to be honest, I didn’t mind because my part was done and we combined the work that was done on time. Monday night my friend safe assigned the assignment and found out that 76% of our assignment was plagiarized. First biggest poop disaster. Safe Assign is our uni’s Turnitin program. Now come Tuesday. My friend decided to safe assign the assignment by each person’s contribution to see who the culprit was. And that’s when the second biggest poop disaster happened. And we found out this particular person almost plagiarized their entire part of the assignment. And the time was ticking and tocking. Tick. Tock.
We tried to do damage control but you can’t superglue the Titanic.
My group members and I decided to face our fate, the less Jack fate and more Rose fate. At the time, it looked like we were facing the Jack fate. Doomed. Anyway, other problems occurred as a result everything was shit in those moments.
Third biggest poop disaster. Biggest of them all.
So we asked the culprit why plagiarize…and the answer was embarrassing. An answer that is not be repeated. I will tell you though, that it left us flabbergasted, shocked, surprised, astonished, astounded and staggered to the core. These adjectives do no justice to how we felt at that moment. They. Simply. Do. Not.
I, we, were speechless to say the least. Now, though, I find the whole thing Duching funny. Maybe it’s because after forfeiting a certain percentage in order to re-do the assignment helped. Or maybe I realised sometimes you win some and sometimes you lose some. After all, uni is a place where you learn some serious life lessons. Isn’t it?
However, the story is not the reason why I’m posting this. I’m posting this because plagiarism is a serious offence. And it can more than take affect your mark, it can destroy your future. The person who plagiarized the assignment taught us a lesson. And I’m glad it happened because it taught her a lesson as well. I hope she learned. There’s so much more I can say but I’m running out of time. But I will say this: there is a reason programs such as Turnitin are made. To help us. I cannot stress how important NOT plagiarizing is. And if you’ve been a culprit please make sure it never happens again. Because you are better than that. Do not undermine your intellect with copy and paste.
Like, share and comment. I’d really like to know what you think about plagiarism and your experiences with group assignments.
Yours Truly,
Duchess♥
Duchess Reading 