And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,/ She needs not June for beauty's heightening

(The following is the second of the two articles written by yours truly for the latest issue of !nk. I must give loads of credit to Kevin Low who did a fantastic mock-up of Turnitin for the layout of the page. I will try stealing a pdf copy of !nk so I can re-post this article + layout here.)

A note on academic dishonesty – caveat lector

Term 2 often heralds weeks of mind-boggling academia and imminent doom. Year 6s scramble to complete their drafts of essays comparing wildly adulterous, bizarrely suicidal, insufferably self-assured Scandinavian women victimised by the social ascendancy of the proletariat in the late 19^th century, sweat out over yet-unfulfilled CAS hours, and itch to discard the final drafts of their extensively edited 4000 word-long works of art into the abyss of Final Grading, while Year 5s unburdened crawl swim bound excitedly towards the June “holidays”.

Time glides invisibly by like a halibut through the salty waters of the North Atlantic. You soon struggle to find time to take your Norwegian blue parrot out for its daily flutter or attend your weekly manicure sessions. Your last game of Left For Dead was a whole miserable fortnight ago. Your last movie at the cinema was about a stubborn infantile clownfish beating his father in a game of catch-me-if-you-can-in-this-big-blue-ocean. You, as your superlatively hip, cool, groovy, awesome non-ACSian friends (who have no idea how busy this Baccalaureate-thing gets you) would snarkily remark, have no life.

But you feel you have enough reason not to have a “life”, as astringently observed by your hip, cool, etc. friends: your to-do list stretches as far as 6.8914π times the perimeter of the Astroturf, and you look nowhere near to completing any of the items on the list. “How, how, HOW?!” you cry as you let loose a string of minced oaths.

The Blue Ocean strategy beckons. Behold assignment completion-acceleration like the world has never seen before: You might be inclined to sneak a paragraph or two of Niall Ferguson’s latest dissertation on the ascent of money into your almost-overdue history IA to meet the deadline and the word count. Or you might consider poaching an entire spreadsheet of data with accompanying photographs of the dying money plant and calculations for standard deviation from your unsuspecting classmate. Or better still, you might contemplate paraphrasing Hegel, Hume and Hobbes for your TOK essay.

Who reads Niall Ferguson anyway? Who monitors the eerie consistency of bio IAs? And really, who reads, will read and has read Hegel, Hume and Hobbes?

Well if the three questions in the above paragraph have ever emerged in the cloudy deluded mirage of activity that is your mind this writer aims now to poke logic-shaped holes in your arguments. (Quite a Blue Ocean thing for !nk to do, eh? Since when have we so blatantly associated ourselves with logic?)

Slipping a snippet of work that isn’t yours into your work is, in fact, illegal enough to have you stocked, incarcerated, hanged, or worse, expelled. If you think burgling your friends’ USB flash drives of IAs is harmless, this writer is terribly sorry to be the bearer of disappointing news; copying equals plagiarising equals wrong equals dire, dire consequences. Sure, “paraphrase” is not an anagram, euphemism, palindrome of/for “plagiarise”, but this writer is sure that you really wouldn’t want a half-body apparition of Thomas Hobbes rousing you from your slumber one night as you doze off whilst searching for synonyms of every other word in the Leviathan.

Adhering to our propensity to remain innovative, the Ingenious Blue Deep-sea Policies that we have embarked on include passing each piece of official submitted work through a respectable software called Turn It In. Pass your work through the eagle-eyed originality checker and it soon will be as thoroughly squeezed of plagiarised material and shoddy citation as an orange of its vitamin C-rich fluids as it endures the pressure of an industrial mechanised juicer.

As final deadlines for Year 6s loom, surreptitiously stitching in a piece of intellectual fabric of similar thread count and colour into one’s almost-finished academic quilt appears to be a tempting prospect. However tempting it may seem, this writer beseeches you to think and act otherwise. It’s as conniving as deceiving one’s party guests that one has cooked a homemade, authentic Italian dinner when what happened in the kitchen a few moments ago was merely an assembling of dishes made from readymade ravioli, frozen grissini and pre-cooked primavera sauce.

Nota bene: In the spirit of the blue ocean strategy that we have been briefed on ad nauseam, innovation, creation and conception of original work is more likely to bring returns and rewards to the IB student. Besides, what a show of hypocrisy it would be for any of us to sing of beacons of truth and light and not uphold our morality!

Brave warriors of the Internationalum Baccalauream Diplomus Programmus: suffocate your urge to refer heavily to the many loci classici that might lend you temporary reprieve. Brave plagiarisers who have yet to be turned in: mend your ways a little, lest you may mar your fortunes.