I’ve been there a hundred times. A late-night, last-minute paper turns into an early morning wrestling match with punctuation, missing articles, type-face manipulation, and margin-setting. The works cited is the last thing I think about — and then I copy and paste that baby right up. Get ‘er done, get ‘er done. The printer starts and finally, I exhale.

Rushing to class fueled by equal parts exhaustion and anxiety, I check my bag literally five times on the way to make sure my time investment didn’t evaporate. And then, the moment comes and those double-spaced pages are gone. There’s nothing finer than the shedding of that paper weight. It’s gone into a shuffle, a stack high in the professor’s arms and no longer a thought. The whole class aspirates in relief. We head to the bars, to our beds. We fire up the grill and call our mommas.

But then, sometimes, disaster strikes. Sometimes, a student can get sloppy.

Sometimes the celebration is cut short by an accusation that can literally end their life.

My best friend is in the middle of his own personal nightmare. A five-page interpretation of a Spanish poem might now prohibit him from getting admitted to medical school. He’s been sanctioned by the academic honor board at his college in South Carolina for academic dishonesty.

The exact charge is plagiarism. His professor is accusing him on account of two missing quotation marks. While the end-of-quote citation was there, the marks were not. In the smoky world of student work, this constitutes fraud.

If he’s convicted, he’ll be given a failing grade plus a different kind of mark on his transcript denoting a dishonest act. In the next six months, after his GREs and MCAT, that transcript will flood the admissions offices of his selected schools. We don’t know what the effect of this kind of mark will have on his future.

I’ve always questioned the validity of the undergraduate student paper. Yes, it takes a remarkable amount of attention and diligence in its creation. Yes, there is value for doing something unpleasant just because you’re told to. But on the other hand, as undergrads, we are not allowed to present theories of our own and a citation for every shred of fact and opinion is required. Paraphrasing is permissible and necessary to move one part of the paper to another but is to be treated differently. The whole process is very formulaic and breaks down to an equation, really, but it takes a while to get the hang of it. The bottom line is this: when you’re dealing with 15 pages on a 15-inch computer screen, things can get very confusing very quickly.

Not “knowing,” is certainly not an excuse, but when a wrong is perceived to have been committed, there’s an immediate backlash. Our professors become police officers. An unspeakable tension erects between the faculty member and the student. Things get ugly, quickly.

In a world where nobody sits down to piss, we have trust issues. We don’t leave our laptops hanging out, we lock our bikes. But in college, there’s a false sense of trust. The environs of the undergrad are so crib-like at times, we forget the coddling can stop at any minute and the university and its agents can cut our throats.

When my friend goes in, there is nothing he can say to make the academic review board to lessen the blow. In most academic-honor university code books, the burden of proof falls to the student. He did it but it was a mistake. All he can ask for is compassion, an element not expressed in the codes.

What’s happening to my friend is unfair but not unlawful. He did gum up a citation by not using the level of precision that was required. But there is a difference between an editing error and an intentional wrong. The question is now whether or not the review board will recognize it. My friend is not asking for special privileges, but only to be treated with compassion and understanding and a chance to correct the mistake. He’s asking for an inch.

When an accountant messes up a report, “good faith” is a valid defense. People make mistakes, but typically only mistakes done knowingly merit severe punishment. For my buddy, the tarnishing of an otherwise immaculate academic record is fatal. If we define our lives by where we put our energy, the erasure of a chance to go on to post-graduate study will end this young man’s life.
But did he do it on purpose? Is he guilty as charged? Did he go slack on this assignment? I don’t know, I can only go on what he tells me. That’s the thing about friends — they’re trusted until proven untrustworthy. Friends will help you move, real friends will help you move a body. There’s hardly a burden of proof. I’ll stand by my homeboy.

So I’ll field his panic-stricken phone calls. I’ll assure him it will fade, that all bleeding eventually stops and that a clean conscience is the cure for his broken heart. This event will eventually become an unpleasant memory. Perhaps the honor board will recognize that he is a good student with an immaculate record, they will give him the benefit of the doubt and realize this was an editing error. But we don’t know. There are no guarantees.

The next week, the faculty of the University of Idaho will open their arms to ten pounds of papers from their classes. Be careful. This is a hostile environment. Cite your quotes and cover your ass. The only person you can trust, in this world of Wikipedia, paragraphs and paraphrases, is yourself.

–Originally published in the University of Idaho Argonaut, 1 May 2007