I had such a scary 50 minutes.
The professor walks into class, timed exactly as the bell was ringing. At first I was impressed at how well-timed his entrances were, until once before break I found out that he waits in a side hallway until one minute before the bell was to ring. He holds a large pile of papers in his left hand, the 6-8 page paper on comedic drama which we turned in, like, a million years ago.
"I have good news and I have bad news."
That's never a good thing to hear when discussing midterms.
"The bad news is is that 8 students will open their papers and find an F, and will likely find an F for their semester grades as well. These unfortunate souls were all caught plagiarizing. One particularly daft student even plagiarized from an article I recently wrote on Behn's reliance on Hobbesian values in The Rover.
"The good news is that I'm only allowed to give out so many F's per semester, and these 8 students have put me at my quota. The rest of you have a pretty poor likelihood of failing this class. I'm willing to be that more of you have plagiarized, but I don't have the patience to be typing snippets into google and amazon and whatever else."
I gulped, and probably looked really guilty. My emotions are as prominent on my sleeve as a big Calvin Klien logo on those tshirts that were popular in the nineties. There's only about 45 people in the class, so eight is a huge percentage.
Now don't get me wrong. It's not like I went to cheatnotes.com or anything that actually qualifies as plagarism. Well, maybe.
See, sometimes if I'm having problems on a paper (and I had had problems on the inherent metatheatricality of Jonson) I'll go online and steal a topic sentence, and then write the paper. I type the stolen sentence in capital letters, so I can remember to delete it and replace it with something else. Once or twice I've forgotten to do that, and my teachers left question marks in the margins. I was hoping I didn't do that again.
I've never been more pleased with a C+ in my life. Then again, I've never seen a C+ in my life, so it's a new feeling. I'm not pleased enough to get used to it.
Besides, my boyfriend(!!!) said he'd kick my ass if I don't start studying more. No foolin.
