I finally understand why I was always accused of plagiarism

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My high school english teacher repeatedly accused me of plagiarizing my papers, said she didn't believe i wrote it, I took it from somewhere else etc. Once I had included an interview with the county coroner and she said I just wrote word for word what he told me and didn't ask him any questions at all. etc

She would never offer any proof that I was plagiarizing though she had no qualms about giving me D's and F's for it.

In college, i quickly excelled to the top of my class (was valedictorian actually). My English lit/Composition 2 professor stopped me on the street 3 years later to say that he was still using my papers as examples in his classes. I wasn't writing any different than I had been in high school.

Well since becoming a Graduate assistant i've had the opportunity to review some undergrad's research papers. They are about the quality of writing I was doing at 12. I can't believe they can write like that and be in college. Actually the one girls paper had such poor writing I was like "Who-ah this sucks" and she has won some international awards for past research projects.

Clearly, I wasn't being accused of plagiarizing in high school because I didn't know how to write, I was being accused of it because i did know how to write when I wasn't expected to have that ability.

I'm half tempted to track down my old high school english teacher who was supposed to prepare us for college writing, and send her my papers, complete with professors comments about how great it is.

Last edited by Triangular_Trees on 20 Nov 2007, 12:13 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Sounds about right... I was 'lucky' in high school in that the teachers knew I was well ahead of everyone else so just gave me different work and graded me accordingly. A "C" paper from me would have been an "A+" for the other students.

Recently, an acquaintance is getting her teaching degree and she posts some exerpts of other papers from her classes. Mind you, not the classes she is subbing at but the college classes that other college students are in. The level of writing is below mediocre. It is just down right horrid. Phrases like "going rice", mispellings beyond simple typos or hard to spell words. It really makes me afraid for the future students that these people get to teach.

I've had the same problem. In school it was plagerism and when I was filing a harrasment claim at a job I had I was accused of paying someone to write my letter of complaint for me and suspended for insubordination. How's that for jumping to conclusions.

Of course at the time I was working in a factory and you cant expect anyone doing that to have any intelligence or education whatsoever right?

Yet another reason I would never go back to a younger age. At least good writing skills isnt seen as suspicious at 30.

I ran into this a lot in high school, so my strategy was to choose completly off the wall subject matter because then they could not accuse me of cheating.

I once wrote a 20 page dissertation on how Shakespeare, Hitchcock, and Kevin Smith were the Bards of their times, and used the same cheap pop culture tricks. She wrote "Ok Peter, I get it - you didn't plagerize." in her comments.

My strategy was always to latch on to some minute detail and deconstruct it untill there was hardly any link between my paper and her lessons.

The high school teachers wanted to see passion more then they wanted to see skill, show I focused on my crazy theories.

It served me well into college (taking advanced lit/comp classes when I was going for a BS om computer science confused the hell out of my professors/counseler)

I did this in college I was called up before the review board for content choice twice and won both times. college profs don't seem to like it when you pick topics they dont understand.

I'm famous for making connections between things that often controversial. My favorite comment?

A- you are entitled to your opinion.

man I'd never do that with a real assignment. I cared to much about having the "best" grade to take a risk.

However for the in-class assignments that weren't part of our grade i had fun. like writing about how it my lifes ambition to become a dinosaur




There were times I honestly flipped through the dictionary or did a search on rarely used words sp that i could add them to my paper. i did that if I didn't like the professor "Hah, I know this word, you don't." type of thing, or if I really liked the professor as in, "Look, I'm so intelligent, I know words like this." lol

I only ran into a problem with it when I was student teaching. i wasn't intentionally using "big, rare" words, but hey if I knew the word, it fit the situation and it came best to me, I'd use it. The supervisor kept "correcting" the rare words to being something totally different thinking I had made a typo.

I know you'd think it was a risk, but public school teachers are so desperate to think they are making a difference that subject matter really does not matter at all (except to prove originality in my case). The only thing that matters is that they think they were party to inspiring passion in a young mind. If you can fool them into thinking that you can do whatever you want. This kind of thinking lead me to worry I was a borderline sociopath by the time I finished high school. I just got so good at manipulating those teachers. I graduated with a perfect GPA (although I was not political enough to get valedictorian - yes it was political at my school). I did get my full scholorship (Earned through good grades and an excellent and manipulative essay to the board of regents), which was my only goal in high school. Most of my teachers treated me like some sort of tortured genius and they seemed to take great pleasure in listening to my rants and reading my papers. I just got lucky that I figured out early on what those desperate and burned out teachers crave so badly.

Shaggy,

you do know that I am a public school teacher right.

But I assumed you were not in the group of "those desperate and burned out teachers"

I wish I had been more concerned about that at times. One of the classes I took as a free elective in college, the professor loved my papers. He even went so far as to say they were "Harvard quality," whatever that meant. (I wasn't the only one, there were three or so others, not trying to just sit around and brag here. >_< ) I never had the heart to tell him that I wrote the papers by reading the assigned passages starting around 6pm the night before, drank several energy drinks, and stayed up through the night simultaneously writing / revising it. One of the papers, I got a couple of pages in and scrapped it. But, for some reason he really liked my work. The downside of that was that he tried to encourage me to speak more in class. I tried to politely decline, and I'm pretty sure he flat-out ignored that. X|

The thing he stressed the most about the last paper was that he didn't want any of the discussion to have a focus on the psychological aspect of the situation being discussed. (I need to find that paper. That's about all the details I remember. XD ) I figured I had all high marks thus far, so the hell with it, if he liked my writing so damn much, maybe I could write a paper that ignored some of his "rules" and still impressed him. I think I got a B+ on that paper, but he was clearly annoyed about my taking a chance. Apparently not too annoyed.

Nice save.

i had that problem too... stupid bastards.

they did that for my art too... i remember entering a contest in 1st grade and they said that i didnt do the poster and they kept it too, after disqualifying me from contest.

was partially why my parents had me taken out of that school.

This happened to me during my first year in University, I was accused of plagiarism.. Needless to say it was an interesting debate to get out of that "mess".

Needless to say I had enough proof on my side to win - and to earn a certain degree of respect from my professor

I've always been surprised by the inability to write that seems to fester in my peers. I sort of expect it in the "normal" classes (ie, not advanced), and I get that everyone's not going to be good with writing; some people just aren't, and that's cool. However, the level of writing that I see in the senior "advanced" English class (in an "advanced" school) shocks me sometimes. Basic comma errors, run-on sentences, spotty body paragraphs, ect. That's supposed to be advanced, but it's something I would expect from a fifth grader.

(Believe it or not, I really can write well when I wish, as arrogant as that sounds. I know it doesn't look like it judging from some of the stuff I write here.)

Interestingly enough though, I've never been accused of plagiarism. The teachers have just accepted that it's my work. (The last time we had "peer editing" (I don't know the purpose of such; not under more arrogance, but because if most of the class is going to make basic errors in their own papers, they're not going to catch them in others' papers), the girl took it up to the teacher because she couldn't find anything; the teacher looked at the name and handed it back to her right away with a "It's Heather's. You're not going to find anything wrong with it.") I suppose that could be because I write the same on all assignments, even in essay questions during a test; I can't really fake those if I don't know the questions beforehand (and I don't know them). I know it annoys the heck out of some of them; I've had two separate English teachers who really, really, and really didn't like me (although the one did end up liking me by the end, because she realized I wasn't trying to slight her), but both had to admit that I knew what I was doing, and that I did it well.

I've only been accused of cheating once, which was actually this past week. The English student teacher picked out about half a dozen tests that she suspected had outside help (ie, the book) and informed the teacher that she thought we were cheating (would have been a feat, considering we took the test in class and no one brings his/her book anyway, but that's beside the point). No one she accused had cheated; fortunately, the teacher believed us.

I've only taken one English course in College and my teacher hated me because I complained about why I got a 96% on my first assignment .

I asked why I got the points off and she said that "No paper is perfect." I asked her what was wrong with my paper and she shook her head and walked away.

The next paper she gave me a B. And on the final paper she gave me a C+. She said that I didn't put enough effort into my writing .

Triangular_Trees, in school now it is plaguerism unless you add in Lolz, omgz and wtfever.

This is not writing, it is just thought!

You do not write, you paint with words!

English Majors put a price on my head, Art Majors rejected me.

I was so lucky.