The situation I am about to share with you is not something I could ever feel proud of or say it was a justified action. I am writing this letter to show my understanding of the disgusting action I committed before. Plagiarizing was not my end goal when I copied those lines from the Rotten Tomatoes website. At the moment I was worried I might not be able to get to the movie rental in time and decided to use a piece of another person’s writing for completing the assignment I had to submit. Even though I obtained a copy of the movie the next day, I was not confident the work I submitted was absolutely correct and fully reflected my opinion on the film. Being caught with plagiarism in supposedly mine paper made me feel even worse.
Despite little time passed since I have been caught plagiarizing, I spent every single minute of my free time thinking over my actions, analyzing them and looking for alternative solutions. The main thing I understood was that education is not concentrated merely on timely completion of the assignments and turning them it, it is also the huge responsibility students has. I realized that if all the students acted as I did and plagiarized their assignments, it would have taken only a few years for the society to degrade, as all the university graduates would turn into people copying the thoughts of the others, leaving no space for personal approach, thinking and analysis. This changed my views on plagiarism a lot, making it a part of my past and leaving no free space for it in the future. I learned my lesson from my own experience, and it is way better than learning something from the books or even from my peers. Learning more about plagiarism brought in changes to my personality – I became more responsible, evaluated my top priorities for study and decided to become an excellent student deserving to be a role model to the others. If I had to choose between plagiarizing my paper and submitting it later(provided the professor allowed me to), I would have definitely gone with the second option, as that way I would have been honest with myself and my professor. I would definitely try to avoid such unpleasant occasions in the future.
As my behavior changed a bit, my view for myself became different as well. Previously I did not pay too much attention to the way I studied and behaved in the university. However, now everything changed, and I made a critical review of my understanding of the school academic policies in general and academic integrity in particular. I understood the importance of maintaining academic integrity and currently trying to share it with my peers who study and experience various challenges like I did. Hopefully my example would be a great lesson to anyone who would try to cheat, bypass the system and would go looking for an easier way out instead of using one’s own hard work, implementing dedication and spending time to study. Moreover, such people would be able to understand the possible consequences of their faulty actions before they commit such. I wish the story of me breaking the rules and failing to understand and keep up to the school academic integrity could be the last one in history, so that no other students would lose their academic integrity and go off the right track. Plagiarizing experience would always be a reminder for me that nobody should break the rules, as sooner or later they would be caught and punished.