On the Internet, Everybody Knows You’re a Cheat

It’s always fun to start the morning with an object lesson in not trusting internet sources, particularly followed up with a side dish of a plagiarist getting slammed. The writer of the above site shares a series of chat sessions in which he was solicited to write a college student’s essay over IM, which he proceeded to do as poorly and factually inaccurately as possible, and then reported her to her school as well as posting the story (and her full name) on his website. Particularly interesting is the long thread of comments, enough to spill over onto the next entry, discussing whether what he did was “fair” or not. While I can understand the people who feel putting her name online might be going a step to far, as she will now never escape this action, I think it’s a lesson in not asking strangers to help you participate in immoral acts via a recordable conversation. There is no way in which a zero on that paper wouldn’t have been preferable for this woman. In fact, you can see exactly how badly it all turned out by clicking forward through the blog entries for the next few days to find out the whole story. [via Bitch. Ph.D.]