Sweet, sweet Karma.

[athelind]

College student logs onto AOL to solicit someone to write a paper for her, due the next morning.

She hooks up with someone who, unbeknownst to her, belongs to a New York sketch comedy group.

He delivers the paper, deliberately written to make the plagiarism obvious, and riddled with deliberate mistakes and in-jokes.

He also delivers her name, and a record of the exchange, to school officials.

Now, that's karma-dy!

Comments

[rikoshi.livejournal.com]

Owned.

[dragonrift.livejournal.com]

Well, that's what she deserves for being too lazy to do her own work, AND for being gullable to people's online profiles! Haaa! What a tool! XD

[cargoweasel.livejournal.com]

Some Hindu scholar.

Karma can only be apportioned by the cosmos!

[mavjop.livejournal.com]

I thought it was really very funny, and rather delicious justice too, but after reading the comment posted by "Val" (March 29, 2005 03:11 PM), I'm not quite so happy about it. Val made some fair points.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I love it. It's wonderful to see a cheater get what's coming to her, especially when I myself did it the hard (and honest) way.

[mavjop.livejournal.com]

Oh, definitely. Don't get me wrong. My comment above may have suggested that I was more sympathetic to the plagiarist than I am.

The following excerpt from the comment I mentioned, however, I felt contained some good points:

"To find out her identity and her school is acceptable. To report her to the administration, a more appropriate handling of the offense, would be acceptable. They could have flunked or expelled her as they saw fit. With your logs as proof she would have been punished, case closed. Then you could truly claim the value of your diploma would be maintained AND that you had done a noble, if somewhat petty, deed.

To destroy her is unacceptable! How could you claim the power to destroy another person's life? Who died and left you God?

To expose her real name, school and location has bared her to dastardly treatment by other evil humans everywhere. They will continue your cruelty to her."

Anyhow, just something to think about, that's all.

[dragonrift.livejournal.com]

I dunno about that. Even though I can definitely understand your feelings, I for one feel that people of THIS gullable of a level, combined with mindless irresponsibility, deserve to be mocked.

Come now. The internet world is a place where so many things can be fabricated, it's hard to take ANYthing seriously on there. ESPECIALLY now. There are so many scams, even with big name sites, that the fact that this girl made it into college appauls me. I mean come on.... she found this guy from just doing a profile search. When I used AOL back in the mid-90s, I gave myself the screen name Toriyama96, which was after the famous Dragon Warrior/Dragonball Z artist. You have no idea how many "fan emails" I got from people thinking I was really Akira Toriyama. Fed up with the stupidity, I ditched the screen name.

Another thing is that she was stupid to PAY a complete and total stranger an absurd amount of money to have them do HER work FOR her and have her claim it as her own to her professor. Plagiarism is not something that is taken lightly from schools, and is sadly not enforced as well as it should be. Also, she took risks of sending the stranger a check, who could have easily been a scam artist alone, with her account number, address, phone number....etc...

So, as much as I highly respect your opinion, I can only disagree and offer my thoughts. Just remember that she could have very well done the paper herself, and would be in a much better position... She brought this action upon herself. No one twisted her arm.

[mavjop.livejournal.com]

The stuff I quoted was someone else's feelings, not mine, however I did say they made some good points, so I do agree to some extent--at least enough to make me feel a little bad about it all. It's easy to jump on a band-wagon, but even royal f*ck-ups sometimes deserve a second chance. Later. After they've experienced the consequences.

She absolutely could have done the paper herself, and ... wow, yes, she did a really long list of astoundingly stupid things, and I really have to wonder whether she got herself on the dean's list by paying for all her papers, and, well, yeah, she deserves to be found out and probably kicked out of her university.

While she deserves sh*t for this now, and making an example of her might indeed make others think again about trying the same thing... she'll get more than enough sh*t from her university, presumably, and it would serve as about as much of an example to others without her real name being revealed to everybody on the 'net.

She's clearly a dumb kid. It would be kind of unfortunate (IMHO--perhaps this is too sentimental of me) if 5 or 10 years from now she'd grown up and stopped being a stupid kid, and had managed to get herself an honest education, but potential employers did a Google search on her name and found this stuff and she was unable to get a job.

Punish her now? HECK yes. I can rub my hands together with glee at the thought that she'll get what she deserves w.r.t. flunking/expulsion. Punish her for the rest of her life... that I don't think I can really get behind.

Anyhow, that's enough over-analysis of this. =) Sorry for being a downer.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

I can see the points. My rebuttal would be: nothing on the internet is private. Anyone who thinks differently is fooling themselves. She opened herself to all of this in the first place.

In a similar position, I wouldn't have toyed with her to that extent, and I would probably not have published her real name - though I would have published the essay in a place easily googled.

[jirris-midvale.livejournal.com]

Nice. I have little respect for people who don't do the work themselves. It really isn't that difficult to do, it's just a lot of work. Seeing someone get pegged this hard makes my tiny amount of college education seem worth it, somehow.

[darkkdragon.livejournal.com]

Simply beautiful :)
I hope she gets what she deserves.

It is sad though that this kind of thing assuredly goes on well more than people realize. There will always be someone who tries to take the 'easy' way out. Karma is a wonderful thing though ^^

Cheers