Story time!
“How I Experienced a Real-Life Ethical Decision Thanks to a 100-Level Ethics Class” (or, “A Real-Life Example of How Dumb Freshmen Are”)

Okay. So our final project in Ethics 103 was a group project. We were to read the graphic novel Watchmen and write a paper on it. The paper was broken into four sections; since our group consisted of four people, we felt the most logical (and easiest) thing to do was to each take a section and write it, then combine our sections before the paper was due.

Well, we all plan to get together a week before the paper’s due in order to get things figured out. We all show up except for this one girl—let’s call her “Beth”—so the three of us choose our parts and get working on them, figuring that we’ll just give her the leftover part ‘cause she never showed up.

Fast-forward to the night before the paper’s due (keep in mind that the paper’s due by 5:00 PM on Friday the 12^th, the last day of dead week). We had our in-class final in Ethics, so we all decide to meet afterwards. And what do you know, we finally see Beth (for the first time since our group formed in October). She’s completely lost, she doesn’t know what part she’s doing (even though we’d emailed her several times), and she doesn’t seem to get the concept of her assigned part of the paper (which is very simple and very straightforward: “summarize the ethical issues in Watchmen”).

Eventually, in order to get everything formatted and organized in a coherent manner, everyone agrees to send me their part of the paper to me by 10 AM the next day. Everyone seems okay with this, and we all go home.

Now fast-forward to 4:00 PM the next day—an hour before the paper’s due. What do you know—everyone but Beth had gotten their parts of the paper to me by 10 that morning. Luckily, I had decided the night before to write Beth’s part of the paper, figuring something like this would happen. I had just gotten home around 4 that afternoon in order to print the paper and get it up to the philosophy department by 5. Well, I checked my email one more time and guess what? Beth, at about 4:00, had finally emailed me her part. “Here is what I wrote for my part,” her email message said. “Sorry it took me so long.” Following this was her paper. Okay, I thought. No big deal. She’s a slacker, but at least she got it to me.

I copy and paste her paper part into Word, and instantly I notice something wrong: hyperlinks. About 20 or so words in her essay are underlined in the familiar “this is a hyperlink” fashion. I take a quick look the first paragraph of her “essay,” and notice it seems especially well-written.

So I click one of the hyperlinks and sure enough, it leads me to a page with the exact same essay on it. She had found a summary of Watchmen, copied it and pasted it into an email, and claimed it as her own work. Classic plagiarism.

IN AN ETHICS CLASS.

So I debated with Aaron and Lanky for about 10 minutes over what I should do in my little situation, then finally decided to put what I had written for Beth’s part into our final essay, ran up to the philosophy department (it was like 4:50 by this point), turned it in, and told our recitation leader what the situation was. I later forwarded Beth’s email to him as well as provided him with the link to “her” essay online.

I felt like I should have emailed her and warned her instead of turning her in, but then I realized that she had put all of our grades in jeopardy if her plagiarism had been caught by our recitation leader rather than by me, since he would not have known we had broken up the sections person by person. So I have very little sympathy.

People are dumb.