Like, Plagiarism

I unintentionally overheard a young woman engaged in a heated cell phone conversation the other day at the Columbus Airport. I mean, how can you help not hearing endless cell phone chatter seeping into any cherished moment we actually find to think, reflect and relax.

It seems that this college student was quite "kan kan" - "that's 'pissed off' in Japanese" as Sean Connery bellowed in the movie, Rising Sun - because she had to do a semester's worth of homework that day. She was supposed to create a blog on a particular subject, solicit comments and build readership over the course of several months. Now, it seems, she was copying other people's blogs and making their thoughts her own, all while waiting for a plane.

She said, "You know, it's, like, for this PR class that really sucks and, like, nobody knew we were supposed to do this." Pause. "Ya, it's in the syllabus but, like, nobody reads that." In concluding the conversation, she asked her friend to find somebody to do her statistics homework this summer. "Like, I'll pay them to do it, you know. I'm really, like, bad at that stuff."

I'm trying to avoid all the feelings this encounter naturally evokes, not the least of which is that somebody is paying countless thousands of dollars so that this young woman learns only how to beat the system. The responsibility for doing the work rests solely with her, but the responsibility for detecting that she did not do it belongs to her professor. We can only hope that the system works and may not always be so damn beatable. It would be, like, wonderful.