Generally, plagiarism is not a problem in this course since most of you are basically honest and conscientious. Furthermore, we'll be doing a lot of inclass writing and we'll be following the progress of your work as it develops. Make sure that all of the work you do in this course is yours and yours only. Papers that have received help from any other person or source than The Writing Center will not be acceptable. The only way we can make progress here is to deal with what you produce; otherwise, we're just wasting our time. If you plagiarize, I'll use Del Mar's plagiarism policy to resolve the case.

Actually, the web has complicated the issue of plagiarism considerably in recent years, partly because it's clouded the question of who actually owns text once it's out on the web, and partly because text has simply been made much more available...a lot of it can be downloaded with the push of a few buttons. Recently a number of "term paper mills" have sprung up on the web. These are websites where students can acquire term papers to turn in to their classes. Businesses like this have existed for a long time, so this kind of entrepreneurship isn't particularly surprising; it's just that the web has made it considerably easier for students to obtain these papers. As a point of interest, you might want to take a look at a couple of these sites, but I recommend that you don't buy anything...they are expensive...and I'll discuss the quality of the papers below: You could start with the aptly named Evil House of Cheat.

One the the first ones on the web, and my own personal favorite, is "School Sucks," which appears to have been developed by students for the purpose of providing term papers to other students free of charge and now claims to have "30 megs of termpapers."  The sorts of papers that you can find on these sites won't be of much use to you in my class, since most of our work will be fairly specifically guided by our discussions inside and outside of class, not the sort of thing that you're likely to find help for on one of these sites. But if you ever put your ethics aside long enough to consider using a paper from one of these sites, remember that many of them are of questionable quality, as the School Sucks people admitted in a "letter to professors." And, actually, these guys don't write so well themselves.

Also remember that if you found the paper on the web, it's still out there, and many professors can find them, too, using some of the powerful search engines. In fact, I managed it myself in a class recently.