Did I steal this column from the Internet?

I was up late, working under a deadline, and I just had no idea what to write about. I… I was up late, working under a deadline, and I just had no idea what to write about. I think I’d had about eight or nine or 20 Mountain Dews in the last hour and I started to feel my body sublimate into pure energy. I may be some sort of glowing, plasma-based life form by the time you read this.

I was stuck for a topic so I did what anyone would: I went to the Internet. After a quick stop at teenslutwarehouse.com, I found a piece in the New York Times about the rise of Internet plagiarism. Then I just cut and pasted bits and pieces of it.

For instance, “Thirty-eight percent of undergraduate students surveyed said that in the last year they had engaged in one or more instances of ‘cut-and-paste’ plagiarism involving the Internet, paraphrasing or copying anywhere from a few sentences to a full paragraph from the Web without citing the source.” I didn’t get that from the New York Times, but did the research on my own, asking my 18,000 closest student friends, 2,600 faculty members “at large public universities and small private colleges nationwide.”

Thirty-eight percent! That’s a lot of percent! I found it pretty hard to believe so many of my friends were engaging in plagiarism. Then I thought about how often I’d heard them describe Radiohead as “listenable.” Clearly they were copying from each other, because no one could possibly come to that conclusion on his or her own.

OK, so my friends are liars and cheats, or at least a good percentage of them. What did this mean? I had another dozen Mountain Dews while I thought about it.

Aha! Clearly, being a cheater would make it impossible for them to succeed in the Platonic realm of The Real World. Not only would they soon be denounced by the home audience as manipulative frauds, but there’s no way they could become the head of a major corporation such as Enron, WorldCom or Global Crossing. Justice would be served and cheaters and liars would quickly be cast down to the fiery depths where they belong.

As I read further, though, I stole another idea: what if the students weren’t to blame? One of my friends in the survey wrote, “If professors cannot detect a paper from an Internet source, that is a flaw in the grader or professor.” Of course! After all, it is the job of teachers to make sure you don’t cheat. (Sometimes they forget that in their efforts to convince you to learn. Eggheads!) That’s what college students are paying for, and in a quote that tangentially supports my argument, our own president – a college graduate himself – said “It’s your money. You paid for it.” True dat, Mr. P.

Another student commented, “If teachers taught better we wouldn’t have to cheat.” Though the 18,000 friends I interviewed for my survey are all anonymous, I can only assume this one was in a logic class. Think about it: if teachers taught better, we wouldn’t have to cheat.

Similarly, another comment: “Maybe schools and parents should focus on learning instead of grades.” Do you see? If the focus were more on learning instead of on testing whether or not we’d learned something, students would be less likely to cheat to get higher grades and would instead spend their time learning.

In conclusion, I’d like to conclude with a quote: “Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.” Somebody said that. Einstein maybe.

Jesse Hicks stole this tagline from the Internet. He may be reached at jhicks@pittnews.com.