-
Plagiarism is a serious bid-niz
Of all the people on the internet, I never really thought I’d fall victim to plagiarism. I’m really not that clever. I don’t make the funny memes. And yet, even my sad attempts at humor have now been passed off by someone else as their own. I don’t if it was due to a lack of understanding of how tumblr works (meaning they wanted to reblog because they thought it was cool and didn’t realize that there was a function for that), or if they wanted people to comment on it and thought that was the best way to do it. Maybe they are too young to have been taught how to cite other works or give credit to those they borrow from. Who knows. But as recent graduate with a degree in political science, fresh off of writing an 85 page thesis, this bothers me. Plagiarism is a serious offense. Passing off the intellectual property of someone else as your own is an unacceptable practice. At the very least you will be failed for the assignment in which you did this. At the most? You can be kicked out of school. And if you have aspirations to academia like me? Your career will be more or less over. No top school will take you with that on your record. This is because plagiarism is cheating. You didn’t do the work yourself.
Now, most of you who follow me or will read this are football fans. You would never accept cheating in the game, why accept it on tumblr? Thierry Henry will always have a blemish on his record because of that handball. Decades later, people shake their heads and frown at Maradona’s ‘Hand of God’ goal. Juventus lost titles for match fixing during the Calciopoli scandal. You know its wrong in the game, so why accept it elsewhere?
I don’t want to call anyone out, and I don’t want to be mean. But I can’t let this go unsaid.
