Plagiarism Experience

From the beginning of the plagiarism paper I was extremely skeptical about the whole idea. Since middle school when we are first introduced to the wonderful world of research papers, teachers make it a point to scare us away from plagiarism. It is the worst thing that you can do academically.

Then this assignment came along and told us that it was our goal to plagiarize and do so to the best of our abilities. When it was first introduced I had the idea that this would be the easiest of our papers, since all that was required of us was to steal the work of others. After getting a start on the paper I realized that this was definitely not the case. This assignment really showed me the hardships that can actually arise when attempting to plagiarize the work of other people and do so in a fashion that makes it difficult to be found out. Everyone that plagiarizes generally does so in order to cut corners and finish their papers quicker than if they actually wrote it on their own, but after going through this assignment, I learned that it is actually much easier to just do ones own work than attempt to plagiarize. Not only did I learn that this paper would have been finished faster if it were in fact my own work, but there is a guilt that is associated with plagiarizing. It is no different from stealing from a store and in that sense it is not something I could ever justify doing.

Another thing I realized in completing this assignment is that there are many out there that plagiarize, or so it seems. In my attempt to find the plagiarism of the people’s papers that I had, I found that the information that they found on one website, I was able to find word for word on a completely unrelated sight. It really raises the question of whose work I am actually reading when referencing the internet.

Finally, it is actually amazing how easy it was to find instances of plagiarism in most of the papers. I thought that I took some clever approaches to plagiarizing my paper, yet most of what I plagiarized was discovered. It really shows how risky and worthless plagiarizing actually is and it truly is much easier and rewarding to simply do your own work.