With the hbomberguy plagiarism video on fire right now I want to share my favorite example of egregious plagiarism.
I’m a marine biologist. Currently getting my PhD. I’ve done a lot of scholarly writing. Many classes I took as an undergraduate had big writing components. I took limnology at one point as an elective. This course had one such big writing assignment.
The professor told us a story. He said he once got a student paper that absolutely blew him away. It was way beyond what he’d expected from the class. This was before we had online tools to check for plagiarism. The paper impressed him so much that he brought it home to show it to his wife. She began reading it and then set it down, looked at him, and said, “Dan, you wrote this.”
This student was dumb enough to not only copy a published paper verbatim, but to copy a paper published by the professor of the class.
AND HE NEARLY GOT AWAY WITH IT.