Navigating Academic Accusations: A Personal Experience with Plagiarism Claims

In today’s digital learning environment, incidents relating to academic integrity can arise unexpectedly, leaving students feeling vulnerable and confused. I recently found myself embroiled in such a situation in one of my online college courses, leading to a rather unusual sequence of events that I’d like to share.

A few days ago, I received a troubling email from my professor accusing me of plagiarism. She stated that I had submitted another student’s work along with her name to the academic submission portal. Initially taken aback, I knew that there had been a mistake, but the implications were serious. The professor threatened to escalate the matter to the dean of academics at my university, where I attend full-time.

The misunderstanding stemmed from a requirement in our course: we were instructed to upload our assignments for peer review. The submission guidelines stated, “Post your assignment here so everyone can view your ideas.” This led me to download a PDF of a classmate’s assignment to better understand the expectations. However, when I finished my own assignment and went to submit it, I mistakenly uploaded her document instead due to the similar file names.

Upon realizing my blunder, I quickly reached out to my professor, extending my sincerest apologies and clarifying that it was an honest error. To support my claim, I shared my intended PDF submission and even included a screenshot of the file’s metadata, demonstrating that my work had been modified prior to the submission deadline.

To my surprise, the professor responded, stating that I would receive a zero on the assignment because I had “crossed a line” by referencing another student’s work as a model. Frustrated, I replied, reminding her that the course instructions explicitly encouraged us to look at peer submissions. In my email, I quoted the precise sentence, only to discover that shortly after I hit send, that specific line had disappeared from the submission page.

It appears that the professor might have removed it to avoid acknowledging the instruction she had given. In a moment of desperation, I thought about how to retrieve the original context of the guidelines to support my case. Unfortunately, I found that sites such as Wayback Machine had not archived the page in question, making it challenging to present evidence of the original instructions.

An Unexpected Resolution

Fortunately, after some back-and-forth communication, my professor later clarified that she had deleted the line not to obscure the instructions but rather to minimize confusion regarding the