User blog comment:Raidra/The Case for Vetting Graduation Speakers/@comment-17385488-20160522085338

While I do extend my sincerest congratulations to your nephew, Raidra, (Tell him he's a part of the club now) I want to take a moment (Or a lot) to shed some light on similar experiences with this due to Doom bringing up the class salutatorian possibly plagiarizing on the university level.

Incoming slightly off-topic story/rant.

As I stated in my Life blog, I recently completed my freshman year of university. Near the end of the spring semester, specifically the last day of class before final exams week, we walk into our English 102 class hoping to turn in our 8-10 page research papers with photocopies of our sources, get our prompt for our take home final exam, and sign the attendance sheet on the way out the door. Unfortunately, that didn't happen as our professor (I'll call him Dr. Lee) walked in with a sour mood on his face and looked like he was about to explode on us. We soon found out that Dr. Lee had finished grading some papers for one of his English 101 class and some people plagiarized. He then proceeded on a short tirade denouncing it, but I'm not here to explain his tirade because I don't even remember the specifics of it.

I get it. English 101 classes are there to introduce students to the basic fundamentals of writing essays and research papers on the college levels so students are bound to make some rookie mistakes. Plagiarism can be considered a rookie mistake, but it's a costly one. When I was in high school, we were taught how to write essays and the evils of plagiarism and resulting consequences of it. Heck, even at my university, they can expel you for that. At least look up the Wikipedia article for your topic, read some of the sources it's citing, and write what you saw in your own words! Plain and simple! But no, people decide to choose the easy way out and copy/paste others' work as their own,  thinking that they can easily fool their professors. Even Dr. Lee posted in the guidelines for the paper that he will be especially hard on the papers in detecting plagiarism, so you know you're not getting away with squat. Don't even try.

I remember having my parents write my papers for me back when I was in middle school. Very compelling stuff, I know. Those days are gone. Now I do the work on my own, even though I'm a chronic procrastinator that wait until the night before the paper is due to even write the first word beyond the heading and title. Despite kicking into maximum overdrive (Kudos to you if you get that reference) until the early hours of the morning writing my papers, I managed to make even BETTER grades than when I had them written for me. Funny enough, my parents tell me it's not my best work because I didn't spend as much time on it as I should have. I think the As speak for themselves. And even funnier, I don't think they've read any of my college papers except for when I'm doing papers for political science.

Sigh. It makes me sad seeing people that I personally know go on Facebook saying how English is hard and one of their friends posts in the comments asking if they are getting their so-and-so friend to write their papers for them again. No wonder you made a C in English, you dolt.

End story/rant.

Again, congrats to your nephew. It's a great accomplishment.