Plagiarism

Plagiarism is a trap that not only students can fall into, but adults as well. It does not pertain only to written compositions either. It can be applied to patents, videos, code, and basically any other piece of work that is copyrighted and published by someone. However, plagiarism is not always intentional. It can occur from people being careless and forgetting to cite their sources properly. When work is intentionally plagiarized, it shows a person’s true integrity and laziness. In my programming class last semester, there were about 20 students that received honor code violations from FSU. Basically, instead of getting help from teacher assistants or tutors, they decided to copy and paste code from the internet and attempted to use it for their assignments. These homework assignments were not easy, and on average an assignment could take 2 to 5 hours. It was insulting to the rest of the class that they would try to skate by and do the bare minimum. Additionally, since they did not actually do the assignments, they were robbing themselves of the opportunity to teach themselves to code and do well on the tests! Overall, it is never worth it to cheat, because you are only cheating yourself of an opportunity to succeed.