Name: Times I Plagiarized
Uploaded: 2017-07-01T10:06:15.000Z
Duration: 8 min 39 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of degree

I almost lost a thousand-dollar scholarship because of plagiarism.

The practice of taking someone else's work or ideas and passing them off as one's own.

Just the word plagiarism sounds like a crime.

I'm not here to talk about people who repost my comics, JPEG'd, cut my name off, and have the audacity to

put their own watermark on, nah nah nah nah, not that kind of plagiarism.

I'm gonna tell you about all the times that I plagiarized, in school.

And, OK, just off topic, I wanna address something publicly.

I don't go looking through other people's comics and go:

"Oh, this comic's funny! I'm gonna redraw it and pass it off as my own!"

But some of my comics have been very similar to other people's comics.

I read a lot of comics, so it's possible I saw them and then repressed them in my memory

or it's possible that it's all a coincidence and me and someone else just came up with the same idea,

it happens all the time with other cartoonists, not just me.

Again, I don't purposely take comic ideas and try and pass them off as my own.

Whenever people point out that my comic is a lot like someone else's, I get really sad.

So you guys should check out these other cartoonists, they're really good.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that at the beginning of the video, because

I'm gonna be telling you about times that I actually DID plagiarize.

An occasional glance at my partner's desk,

maybe jot down that important equation on my hand, nothing TOO big.

I had a Math Class where we went to Lunch in the middle of the class,

and whenever we had tests, the teacher wouldn't split the test into two parts.

The first time that I got caught cheating was in 9th grade.

And if you stalk me and watch my old videos, you know that I went to a preparatory school

And in preparatory school, the amount of work they gave you as kids was just STUPID!

In one class, we had to write an essay about something historical? or something?

And I chose to write about the Berlin Wall.

Specifically about people who escaped ACROSS the Berlin Wall.

Now I chose this topic because... I don't know if you know this,

but there's a National Geographic documentary about this exact topic.

So I didn't copy and paste anything into my essay, per say.

It's just I told the exact same stories in the exact same order as the documentary,

and, OK, I might wrote some things down word for word.

But at least I didn't plagiarize it from Wikipedia, OK?

...until I had to write the conclusion of the essay.

And I found this article talking about it, and the article said some things that would've been PERFECT in

I turned it in, I didn't think too much of it,

but then when I got it BACK, the conclusion paragraph had been highlighted,

So I had gotten in trouble for plagiarizing the conclusion.

To be honest, I'd kinda forgotten that I copied and pasted the conclusion.

I thought he knew that I basically turned in the script of a documentary.

He took me outside of the classroom, he told me that it was bad that I plagiarized,

and he called my parents, that freaking snitch.

He gave me a chance to rewrite the essay, and I remember just being so traumatised

I kept thinking: "What if he finds the documentary and sees that I practically plagiarized the whole essay?"

I ended up rewriting not only the conclusion, but the whole freaking essay.

I turned in the new essay, and I don't think he ever found out that I copied the whole thing.

Except, I did just admit it. And he watches my videos.

Seriously, in April he emailed me and asked if I was the same James that was in his class.

He's the only teacher to ever reach out to me.

And even after all those years, I still didn't tell him that I plagiarized the whole thing.

Uhh, you can't change my grade now, can you?

But that was a good experience for me to have.

Because I didn't plagiarize a single essay for the rest of High School.

But then Community College rolled around.

I did Community College for a bit, because I couldn't afford university on a Subway payroll.

I took honors and A.P. classes in High School, I was a relatively good student.

Except I didn't take any of the A.P. tests.

So when I went to Community College, I had to take classes that were a step BELOW the classes I took

Senior Year of English, we were writing essays and analyzing poetry.

Freshman Year of College, we were writing movie reviews.

And the teacher didn't even like me, she thought I was a slacker because I was never paying attention.

I didn't take Community College seriously, but it was so easy, I was still getting amazing grades.

On the third semester of Community College, I took a Public Speaking class.

but I don't have a problem with Public Speaking.

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Times I Plagiarized

community

coincidence

rid

exact