school I had above-average English grades, and for all my essays and projects I had received nothing less than an A minus (A-). I vividly recall being among over one hundred and fifty students in the New Arts Block (NAB) lecture theatre for the first FOUN1012 class. The room was congested. I was sweating. I could barely feel the cool wind that was escaping the two air conditioning units present in the room. My nostrils detected the odor of every sweet-smelling delight that diffused and circulated among the room’s concrete structure. This environment was not conducive to learning I thought to myself for a moment, and then I left the room to catch my breath and purchase a corn dog. When I returned to the NAB lecture theatre, eyes from all angles were staring at me, so I raised my right index finger, tightly held the corn dog in my left hand, and tiptoed to my seat. It was clear from the PowerPoint presentation the lecturer, Dr. Sonjah Stanley-Niaah, had already covered the no-tolerance policy of plagiarism. She was now explaining the very first assignment, which was due the following week. “This assignment is five percent of your final grade!” she exclaimed. My first university assignment was to write an essay on my perception of English, based on the experience I had in secondary school, and I plagiarized. Sitting on the bed in my dorm room with my back against the cold wall, and my Dell laptop on my lap, I typed keywords into Google and clicked search multiple times. I skimmed through several essays on high school English, and I copied bits and pieces of what I thought would form a great essay from a few. Full stop! Enter! My essay was completed in less than three hours. After careful revision, I felt confident enough that I had compiled a well-organized essay, so I uploaded it onto the university’s virtual learning environment for grading. Since I was absent from a part of the first FOUN1012 lecture, I was unaware that my lecturer had access to an online plagiarism detector known as Turnitin. As a result, I was caught red-handed in an act of academic dishonesty. A week later, Dr. Niaah called me aside after our next lecture and said, “Your essay was very colorful!” I smiled thinking it was meant to
Eliza Daniels: The Pandora
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