If caught in elementary school or high school you will receive a zero. How much it affects you depends on the assignment, but it worsened any grade you had nonetheless. If caught plagiarizing in college, the perpetrator gets kicked out. After graduating high school and spending so much money to go to college, all of the hard work goes down the drain. All of those tests taken and the applications filled out to get into college goes to waste. In addition to being kicked out, the plagiarizer may never get admitted into another college, because once a person is known to have previously plagiarized no colleges will accept them. Now the opportunity to go to college is gone, and getting a good, well paying job will be near impossible. Moreover, most jobs nowadays expect employers to have some type of degree. The jobs that do not, tend to be low-paying and are not really something a person can enjoy or even tolerate doing for the rest of their lives. According to Danielle Kurtzleben, “Among millennials ages 25 to 32, earnings for college-degree holders are $17,500 greater than for those with high school diplomas…” (Study: Income Gap Between Young College and High School Grads Widens). In all, plagiarizing causes a person to lose the opportunity to gain more money in life. Basically, plagiarizing can ruin a person’s …show more content…
In the previous paragraph I wrote about what can happen if you are caught, but people do not always get caught. According to The University of Texas at Dallas, “In a survey of over 63,000 US undergraduates... conducted by Donald McCabe, Rutgers University- revealed the following: 38% [of undergraduates] admit to ‘paraphrasing/copying few sentences from written sources without footnoting it.’” (ACADEMIC INTEGRITY IN COLLEGE AND GRADUATE SCHOOL). Assuming that the undergraduates included in the survey were not caught, they were taking a huge risk and doing the assignment the ‘easy’ way while many of their peers were struggling, losing sleep, and doing work the way it is meant to be done. It should be obvious to anyone that this is extremely unfair. The extremity of plagiarism doesn’t stop here. Another form of plagiarism can either be buying essays or assignments or paying people to do assignments. Someone could also find articles or other people’s essays and copy and paste large chunks of it. Other people work hard to write those essays or articles so it is unfair to take what they worked long and hard for and paste it in a few seconds. If someone participates in any one of these forms of plagiarizing and does not get caught, they will ultimately end up getting credit for something they didn’t even work for. This just shows how unfair plagiarism can