Dealing with Accusations of Plagiarism: A Surprisingly Complicated Experience

Navigating the world of online education comes with its own set of challenges, and one recent experience has highlighted just how perplexing and difficult those challenges can be. Imagine receiving an accusatory email from your professor claiming you committed plagiarism, only to discover that the very instructions you followed were being manipulated minutes after you raised a valid concern. Here’s a deeper look into the situation I encountered.

The Accusation

It all began with a mysterious email from my professor, claiming that I had uploaded another student’s assignment, accusing me of academic dishonesty. The email included the alarming threat that she would report my case to the dean at my university. Confused and anxious, I quickly sought clarification. It turns out her claim had merit: I had indeed accidentally uploaded a peer’s work. Here’s the backstory.

In our course, we were instructed to upload assignments to a forum with the phrase “Post your assignment here so everyone can view your ideas.” Given the ambiguous nature of the assignment, I downloaded a PDF of a peer’s submission to help guide my efforts. Understanding how to structure my work was crucial, and within the confines of the guidelines, I thought it was a reasonable approach. After crafting my own document and exporting it as a PDF, I made the unfortunate error of uploading the wrong file – my classmate’s instead of my own.

The Misunderstanding

Upon realizing my mistake, I promptly reached out to my professor via email to explain the situation. I attached my intended submission and included detailed metadata to demonstrate that my assignment was completed before the deadline. However, rather than resolution, I received another email insisting I would receive a zero for the assignment. Her rationale? I had “crossed a line” by using another student’s work as a model, despite the fact that the submission guidelines explicitly encouraged sharing ideas.

Feeling frustrated yet determined, I sent a respectful reply, quoting the explicit instruction from the course’s website that validated my actions. But when I returned to the submission page to check the guidelines after sending my email, I noticed something alarming—the crucial sentence I had quoted was mysteriously missing.

Seeking Evidence

Within mere minutes of my email, it appeared as though the professor had deleted the very guidelines that supported my case. This raised a red flag for me; it seemed like an attempt to retroactively change the narrative. My next move was to consider how I could