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Hi I'm sorry but you definitely plagiarized and cheated.

Beg for mercy and accept responsibility. If this is your first time you will probably just get heavy warnings and a 0 on the midterm. Good luck.

That is unfortunate, but you really need to take the time to put things into your own words. Someone else wrote those sentences and you passed them off as your own. Hopefully your law school is lenient for first time offenses, but I don't think you have any kind of logical defense.

Imagine you were in a biology undergraduate class and you had to write a complex analysis of Darwin's theory of evolution. Copying and pasting the Wiki definition of "Darwinism is a theory of biological evolution developed by the English naturalist Charles Darwin and others, stating that all species of organisms arise and develop through the natural selection of small, inherited variations that increase the individual's ability to compete, survive, and reproduce" would clearly be plagiarizing, even if the definition of survival of the fittest was simply a basic, well known premise that you use to frame your essay. The word choice, tone, grammar, etc. came from someone else and passing it off as your own creation is clearly wrong.

muskies970 wrote:Hi I'm sorry but you definitely plagiarized and cheated.

Beg for mercy and accept responsibility. If this is your first time you will probably just get heavy warnings and a 0 on the midterm. Good luck.

I would be careful with assuming the consequences are minimal. Personally, I would start by not admitting to anything and figure out what process is available to me.

What are the consequences at your school? Some law schools may take this very seriously and you can end up with a C &F issue, you may already have one.

Just get more info on what your options are. There isn't any question that copying from Wikipedia is plagiarism. It was probably the easiest thing for the software to find.
How extensive was your copying? I know the software gives a percentage of the exam that was copied.

I have no idea how you could reasonably defend yourself. Seems like a pretty slam-dunk case for the school. I guess you could try to say that you, uh, didn't know that plagiarism included copying and pasting stuff from Wikipedia. But everybody is going to think that you're a moron if you try that. I'd probably just admit it, play the idiot, and hope the consequences aren't too severe.

Well if your outline was mostly in your own words, did you innocently mistake the wikipedia definitions as your own prior composition?

There are times when I'm unsure whether something I wrote was paraphrased or copied verbatim on an outline. I erred on the side of caution, but it seems more excusable if due to the time pressure you just goofed and thought it was your own work.

ticklemesilly wrote:Well if your outline was mostly in your own words, did you innocently mistake the wikipedia definitions as your own prior composition?

There are times when I'm unsure whether something I wrote was paraphrased or copied verbatim on an outline. I erred on the side of caution, but it seems more excusable if due to the time pressure you just goofed and thought it was your own work.

I wouldn't make this argument myself.

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Get a lawyer. Tune out these butter soft mamma jammas.

epsilonpegasi wrote:What about arguing that I was extremely pressured for time and I thought copying something verbatim (which is fast and doesn't require thought) would be preferable to leaving the page completely blank?

This is also a bad argument. Because basically you'd be saying that cheating was preferable to getting a bad grade based on what you could actually do in the time allotted. Which of course it is - for you, but that doesn't make it any more ethical.

As for the "I didn't know what plagiarism is on a test" thing, that sounds oblivious, too, when it's clear that a test is supposed to be your own work. The only difference with a test is that you're probably not expected to cite. Still not allowed to copy.

(I'm not trying to bust your chops, but just to say how I think these arguments will come across.)

epsilonpegasi wrote:I mean, I technically did 'plagiarize.'

Sorry man, this was plagiarism, full stop. You kind of shit the bed on this one. All you can do is beg for mercy.

get a lawyer.

Damn this sucks. I could definitely see how someone could do this without thinking. Really feel bad for OP.

How could you get through four years of undergrad and arrive at law school and still never realize you shouldn't be copying and pasting text from Wikipedia and passing it off as your own? I am surprised you got this far in school without being caught yet...

I'm more sympathetic to the OP's situation than many ITT. I'm sure I made outlines in law school that included sentences that were copied verbatim from treatises or case books. If I were using my outline during an open-book exam, I wouldn't think twice about typing those sentences into an exam answer, if relevant. For example, here is a sentence from wikipedia:

"battery is the tort of intentionally and voluntarily bringing about an unconsented harmful or offensive contact with a person"

If, while taking an exam, I encountered a fact pattern that raised the issue of battery, I'd type in that tort's rule or definition straight from the outline. Now, 80% of my answer would consist of analysis that I had to write in my own words during the exam, but the rule statement itself would be copied from my outline, which might, in turn, be copied from another source. I assumed this was common.

Now, maybe the OP copied a lot more than just a simple rule statement from wikipedia. Perhaps the OP copied analysis or policy considerations—something you would expect a student to write in her own words during an exam. If that's what happened, then, yeah, we're in plagiarism territory. But if the OP did nothing more than copy simple rule/definition statements, I'm not sure what the OP did should be considered plagiarism in the law exam context.

You can copy and paste during exams? Does your school not use some kind of lockdown software?

Best COA is to double-down - go to the Wikipedia page and take credit for the text there.

Prior to my first exam, I asked the dean who handles honor code violations about plagiarism on law school exams, and he told me straight out that as far as our school's policies are concerned, law exam responses do not fall within the sphere where plagiarism concerns apply. Rules against copy/paste are enforced (just as any other rule applies), but on an exam, the goal is to spit out legal analysis as quickly and clearly as you can. You don't cite sources on a law exam because (1) you don't have time, and (2) accurate attribution is not the point of a law exam. I'd fight this if I were you.

I mean, to be fair, generic language from Wikipedia is kind of a dumb thing to care about. But if the school does care, then I think the OP's arguments suffer from the flaws I mentioned earlier.

My question is also whether the OP is minimizing what they actually did (especially since they seem to have posted a midterm question on TLS previously?). And maybe the issue is more violating a copy/paste rule than what they copied?

OP: Get a lawyer and delete your posts in this thread ASAP. This is your career you're talking about. My instinct is that you could get in pretty serious trouble for this at your school and, then, later with the Bar. Maybe your lawyer will tell you that this is no big deal. Maybe your lawyer will tell you "just go in and explain yourself--you'll get off easily." But do you really want to gamble your career on that chance?

There's obviously a little disagreement in this thread about how much trouble you're in (although hopefully you've gotten the sense that the predominant sense is that you're probably in real trouble), but I doubt anyone on this thread would say that they are confident that you'll be fine. Your next steps may be important in determining whether you'll ultimately get to practice as a lawyer -- so not screwing those up is SUPER important. The best way to not screw up what you do next is to talk with a professional.

I get that hiring a lawyer probably feels like an escalation to you of something that's not that big of a deal. And I get that the $500 or $1,000 that it'll cost will suck a lot. But this is one of those instances in which you REALLY need to play it safe.

This doesn't sound right.
I know people who copy rules from supplements like Gilbert and Emanuel all the time.
How many ways are there to define battery?
how many ways are there to define what is "knowing" and "voluntary" with respect to confessions?

Op - get your school's honors code handbook (or whatever it's called) and see if your actions constitute plagiarism per their definitions.

A. Nony Mouse wrote:I mean, to be fair, generic language from Wikipedia is kind of a dumb thing to care about. But if the school does care, then I think the OP's arguments suffer from the flaws I mentioned earlier.

My question is also whether the OP is minimizing what they actually did (especially since they seem to have posted a midterm question on TLS previously?). And maybe the issue is more violating a copy/paste rule than what they copied?

I wondered this as well. I took open book exams in law school where profs prohibited copying and pasting from an outline, even though typing from an outline was fine.

I bet like 90% of rule statements are "plagiarized" from somewhere: a case, a restatement, a supplement (which is probably quoting a case or restatement), class notes or some other persons outline.

I think a credible argument can be made that there is no such thing as plagiarizing black letter law on an exam.

Though I wonder if OP went further than that. Summarizing cases might be a bit too far.

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epsilonpegasi wrote:Thanks for the responses.

When I say 'copied' I mean typed verbatim from my outline onto the test page. I'm not referring to the cut and paste function.

Question: what about people who copied verbatim from the professor's slides, or the professor's speech, or from past-year summaries which they used? Would all this not be considered plagiarism too then? Again, I'm just referring to one-sentence definitions or the ratio of a case in one sentence, not a paragraph of detailed analysis.

As I suggested earlier, I don't see how any of this could fairly be deemed as "plagiarism" in the law-school-exam context. But if you're formally charged with an honor code violation of some sort, you of course need to take it seriously.

I'm curious: what form did the "plagiarism accusation" take? Did you get an email from your professor? A formal notice from the registrar's office? Something else?