Personal Statement
Many are times when students dilly-dally in finishing their assignments. In this regard, last minutes rushes in doing assignments is a common phenomenon in all learning institutions; students wait until just when an assignment is almost due before sitting down to do the assignment with most resorting to beating the deadlines through desperate means including plagiarism. Pointedly, in one or two incidences, I have fallen in the category of students who do an assignment issued with a two weeks deadline just a day before the deadline lapses.
On this day, it dawned on me that an assignment was to be collected the following day even though I had not attempted the assignment. I was aware that my room-mate acquainted with a student in the same degree program only that I was a freshman and he was in his sophomore year. On asking him, he admitted to having done and passed the same assignment while he was a freshman. He was also willing to let me have his paper.
Even though I was aware of the institution’s non-indulgent policies on plagiarism, I could not help weighing between failing the assignment and changing the cover page of my room-mate’s friend paper and submitting it as my own. Admittedly, I was just about to guiltily print the paper on the deadline day when the course instructor, through the class representative communicated that the deadline had been extended. Even though this was relatively assuaging, I was never relieved until I finally submitted a new paper, totally different in all aspects (including sources and content) from the one I had planned to plagiarize. As I later learned from my fourth year friends, such an act could never have passed unnoticed by the instructor, and the consequence would have been overly pronounced. I have since managed to dissuade several students from undertaking such an act. Additionally, I have since then been cautious about deadlines.
