Since I'm probably not going to sleep at all tonight, I might as well make a post about it!

To begin with, my online history class? It's been a blast so far, personally. I've loved every bit of it... Not so much the whole "pioneers ruined the American environment" parts of the whole "20,000 years ago, ancient man built giant mound cities"... But once it got into the whole United States actually declaring independence and forming their government? Awesome stuff.

But... Fast forward to tonight. I got an email from someone who was asking about a problem with submitting the paper. I went online and checked it out... Sure enough, someone's sloppy Java programming has exploded all over the server and it wasn't working at ALL. Oh well... I open a help desk ticket and... Then I see an announcement. Apparently, 10 of the around 50ish people in my class have been accused of plagiarizing their papers. At first I thought "oh well"... I'm absolutely sure I didn't outright copy anything and when I did, it was the United States Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, and they were properly cited. So I didn't think much of it... In fact, the only thing I thought was: "Wow, I've noticed some poor writing in the English Composition class, but this is insane."

I didn't think much of it, that is, until an accused student made a public announcement of her own saying how she couldn't believe this was happening, and that she was accused of plagiarizing her introduction from a site she'd never heard of before. She's about like me, too... A's and B's... Dean's List... Not someone you'd think would plagiarize, right? Well... She's gathering material on what's happened and she's going to go present it all to an adviser at the campus where this class is hosted. I dropped this student and email telling her to go for it, and that I had noticed that our class uses a computer system to scan for plagiarized lines. I'd heard of this type of system giving false positives on plagiarizing before, but I can't remember from where. In fact, if anyone knows of a service called SafeAssign by Blackboard? Let me know... This is the system I'm entrusting to judge my honesty for the course of my entire career. Plagiarism is no laughing matter.

So now I'm incredibly worried. If it's true that this system is giving false positives, then I don't want to chance submitting my paper, that I worked VERY hard on, only to get a zero for the assignment AND have my academic history get slapped with plagiarism. I would rather NOT submit the paper and get a zero, get a B, and still have a future. I told this to TW and he made it quite clear that I should contact someone high up and at least voice my concerns over the matter... If anything, he said, it would show them that I'm afraid of what might happen BEFORE it happens, so if it DOES happen, I'll be on record for talking about it before my credibility was compromised. I contacted the Vice Chancellor of Academic Affairs and the Vice Chancellor of Student Affairs of the campus where this history class is taking place. They were the highest profile people in the department of affairs that I could find... Shot them an email a few minutes ago, asking them to respond quickly with at least where I should go with these problems. If I don't hear from them soon, I'll probably call the campus and get some answers that way.

In the meantime, I've also emailed the instructor to see what she has to say about this whole thing. It was initially a message to let her know that there's some issues with the submission system and to perhaps extend the deadline, but I made sure to express my concerns about being accused. I've only just this semester started to learn about sources, so I don't want some overzealous computer program whine about how I might match some random source it dug up and my citations were bad for the simple fact that I'm in the process of learning how to do it...

You'd think that at this level of college, they'd be more apt to contact the student BEFORE calling them a plagiarist and filing the paperwork to blacken their record until kingdom come. I understand the importance for not plagiarizing for things like a Doctorate Thesis, but come on... This is for a 2-year associates degree. It's the lowest of the lowly courses we can take. It's the ENTRY level courses... We're in the process of learning here. I'm willing to bet that most, if not all, of us aren't plagiarizing on purpose. The college says ignorance is no excuse, but what if you've read all the official papers on the subject and you think you know it well enough to not even CONSIDER asking for clarification?

This whole thing reeks and it only adds to the stupidity of this college that I've been facing since day one of my very first semester. I had a moron teacher who read broken sentences out of our own text book that he made us read during the week... Then I had a moron teacher who wouldn't bother to check up on his online students... Now I have a moron teacher who can't bother answering questions about what was wrong with my paper to get a 80 of 100, I'm dealing with a network of campuses who can't seem to get their certification system up and running even though the forms at the beginning of the year led us to believe everything was ready to go BACK THEN, and now our history papers are getting rampantly tagged as being plagiarized without contacting us?

Yes, I'm completely upset... I want this to be over NOW, not in two weeks. I want to take my certifications so I have at least something to show some companies, and I want to leave this sink hole of academic quality as soon as possible. I think I officially have one semester left, but I'm not sure, because they keep changing that on me. I'm sure I'll go in this fall expecting to do certain classes that are on the schedule, but because they were too dim-witted and short-sighted to see it when they PLANNED my classes? They learn that I have to take more pre-requisite classes so I can take the classes they said I could take. When the question is raised about how something like this could happen? The adviser laughs and says nothing's perfect. I about walked out on him right then and there...

Anyway, I'm done ranting... I'll keep you apprised of the situation.