Consequences after being caught cheating

Hello,

I am not proud of what I have done but I think the US academic pushed me to focus too much on academics rather than the actual content.

Background: I am an international student and my undergrad was business, I had the chance to be accepted in an intensive computer science grad program for non-cs majors. However, I need to have at least a 3.00 GPA for each of classes if I want to stay in the program. I am currently taking 2 classes (discrete structures) and another programming class.

I need a minimum of 3.00 GPA for each class I am taking. I only have 2 classes right now but I am also working part-time, most of my classmates have a CS background but even for them, it's quite challenging.

I am doing pretty well in the discrete class but I struggle in the programming class. I have 1 project every week for the programming class since last week everything was fine. My last homework was super hard and even after going to TA office hours, I couldn't do it. I know this is totally stupid but I really don't want to retake the class next semester so I found someone on freelancer.com to do my homework.

Everything worked perfectly and I decided to submit it. I got an email from my professor this morning and she asked me to come to her office, I did not know why but I was sure she could not figure out I cheated. It turns out that the freelancer I hired just copied and paste the code from Github.

The meeting just lasted for a few seconds. She just said something like "you cheated, you copied your code from Git Hub and you'll get a 0 for that exam. You will also get an email from the academic integrity to tell you what's next for you."

She did not want to hear from me so I could not tell her that it was going to fast for me. I own my mistake, I take a risk by hiring someone else and what goes around comes around, that 0 may be hard to overcome but academic integrity is most serious. I am probably going to be convened by the academic integrity to hear from me.

I know I may be kicked out of the school for that, but how can I defend myself?

 

while i agree there is nothing to defend...you are not disputing the facts....you can say that you found the solution on git hub...and you thought that was a good solution to the homework problem.

in the future, when you use copied work...i suggest you spend time to understand the copied material, and then rewrite it yourself so that you can create original work.

just google it...you're welcome
 
French35:
Hello,

I am not proud of what I have done but I think the US academic pushed me to focus too much on academics rather than the actual content.

Here's what you do:

  1. Stop blaming

  2. Take responsibility

  3. Move on with your life

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 
PteroGonzalez:
If you read the whole post, OP does take responsibility.

Not defending OP's actions at all, but if you have nothing useful to say, why speak?

If you read the statement I quoted, he is not taking full responsibility for his actions. He's playing the blame game.

If hooked on phonics doesn't work for you, what does?

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 
Controversial
PteroGonzalez:
if you have nothing useful to say, why speak?

Also, you remind me of a typical millennial. I say a few words, all nice and neat, and you think its not enough. Think of the depth of what I said in those bullet points and what it is going to take for him to accomplish these steps. He hasn't even gotten past step 1 yet. If caught for cheating he might get blacklisted from the school and other schools and number 3 will be very difficult.

All for a stupid ass assignment. I was elected to the Honor Court in undergrad and have prosecuted people for breaking the Honor Code and it is brutal, dude. There's a formal (private) hearing at the end with the verdict and the student and their parents and it is pretty much a sob session near the end. Sometimes the student sits there stone-faced and then after it ends, the parents just lose it. $120K scholarship? Gone. Want to transfer to another school? Nope. Blacklisted.

Because in this world, all it really comes down to is your honor. Your word. Its very simple, but if you think you can cut corners, you can crush your career or tear down your reputation in a second. Don't ever forget that. Also, he tarnished the reputation of the school. They had a requirement and he did not meet it. There are repercussions to breaking the honor code. It weakens the institution. It cannot be tolerated.

There are no excuses for Honor violations. Unless you had a gun to your head, you committed the act and its pretty cut and dry - if sufficient evidence is found to prove without a reasonable doubt that you committed the act. In one trial, a chick and her boyfriend broke up and he sent naked pictures of her to the whole school or something like that. Shortly after, she was accused of an Honor violation. It was something similar to your case - cheating on an assignment. Her defense was that this level of stress caused her to act out of character and commit the Honor violation. Do you think she was let off the hook because she was stressed out? No. Did something out of the ordinary happen to her? Yes. Is that a reason to commit an Honor violation? No.

There's never going to be a reason to commit an honor violation unless you have to do it because your life or a family member or close associate of yours is in lethal danger. That's a whole different story and most of those people work for intelligence agencies. As normal work people, we should not look to lying, cheating or stealing as an option in everyday life. We have enough food, we don't need to steal.

But this path has brought the OP to a road that should be clear to him now. The point that he can't cut corners. Not only is it a bad habit in life, its just bad for the soul. It builds up anxiety, you have to think about it constantly. All to save some time for an assignment? Its just not worth it.

The OP asked for help on how to handle the situation. In my mind, the act has already been done. The steps I outlined are to prepare for getting kicked out of the school. My alma mater wouldn't keep students in the school with that kind of evidence. He would be lucky if they gave him a second chance - I'm not sure what the school policy on cheating is.

So, OP, in the academic integrity board if you have it, own up. Don't fucking blame anyone or anything. Just own it and pray they give you another chance. Because if it was me, I wouldn't. But, in the trials I have been a part of, we didn't give people much chance to speak. Specific answers to questions during the trial and maybe final words after the verdict - that's it. I'd look into the specific processes of the academic integrity board for your school to prepare yourself.

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 

This is like poetic justice. Cheater pays for someone to do their work. That someone cheats the cheater by providing garbage googled work. Cheater, not knowing the difference, hands it in.

Cheater got cheated. School expelled a future felon. Respect.

 
WolfofWSO:
This is like poetic justice. Cheater pays for someone to do their work. That someone cheats the cheater by providing garbage googled work. Cheater, not knowing the difference, hands it in.

Cheater got cheated. School expelled a future felon. Respect.

It's like the drug buyer who gets robbed by the drug dealer. Can't ask for better justice.

 

I still have not heard from the academic integrity. I may have 2 options at the moment. The first one, is to wait till the academic integrity contact me Or I can try to persuade the teacher to punish me in a different way (such a give me extra work + a 0 for that HW)?

 

No, the only option available to you is the one you're not grasping. You say that you own your mistake but the comments after that are "how can I defend myself?" and "how can I get some punishment other than the one mandated by ethics/honor/integrity?"

It's not a matter of "taking risk" by hiring someone else. You broke what I'm sure your university's honor code is. You're sick over this only because you got caught and might have to face really tough punishment - not because of what you did.

"And where we had thought to be alone we shall be with all the world"
 

Exactly, throw yourself at the mercy of the court.

Going forward, work hard and do your work. If you're going through hell, keep going. Complaining about hours as a student is rich, are you even allowed to work in the US or do you study full time? When you are working on the job you will find yourself so much busier. Time to learn some life lessons.

Be excellent to each other, and party on, dudes.
 
MidasMulligan:
No, the only option available to you is the one you're not grasping. You say that you own your mistake but the comments after that are "how can I defend myself?" and "how can I get some punishment other than the one mandated by ethics/honor/integrity?"

It's not a matter of "taking risk" by hiring someone else. You broke what I'm sure your university's honor code is. You're sick over this only because you got caught and might have to face really tough punishment - not because of what you did.

Iyiyiyiyi. At UIUC there was no honor code; just an academic honesty policy that bars plagiarism like at just about every school. That is my assumption here.

What I will say is that this kid got lucky. The alleged facts and circumstances aren't as bad as the actual facts and circumstances-- in industry it's one thing to get caught borrowing code from GitHub or Stacktrace.com (doesn't everybody?); it's quite another to farm out homework assignments to freelancer.com.

In private, for the true situation, I'm gonna come down on this kid like a ton of bricks. Farming out homework for others to do isn't cheating on an exam, but it's just as black-and-white.

For the public allegations, for googling and copying the solution from GitHub or Stacktrace without attribution, pishposh. Doesn't every programmer in industry do this? If you want to work at IBM, unless it's for a real Aspergey guy (probably a PhD), or there's some crazy honor code involved that everyone else at your school follows (IE this happened at UVA or Princeton), plagiarizing Stacktrace or GitHub for a homework assignment is going to get you 1000 lashes with a wet noodle. It's like being the social chair of a fraternity and getting busted for underage drinking your sophomore year.

Keep your head down, quietly check the back of the speeding ticket for 60 in a 45, and just be glad they haven't charged you with the high speed car chase you're guilty of.

Be glad that you got caught in college, and got accused of less than what you actually did. If this had happened to you as an adult, you'd get fired at a minimum, possibly also sued by your former employer for civil fraud depending on how big an example their IT security department wanted to make of you, which would make your career situation a lot more challenging.

And, since you're the kind of guy who gets caught at this stuff, don't make this mistake again.

 
French35:
I still have not heard from the academic integrity. I may have 2 options at the moment. The first one, is to wait till the academic integrity contact me Or I can try to persuade the teacher to punish me in a different way (such a give me extra work + a 0 for that HW)?

I think you should leave our country.

 

Unless it was a closed-book take-home exam where the prof trusted everyone to follow the rules, I'm not pissed. At least OP is fessing up privately.

Let me give OP the same advice every lawyer gives their clients:

1.) Don't talk to anyone.
2.) Sit tight. Waiting is painful, but just STFU.

OP may have a better read, but prof probably doesn't want to deal with this. She has better things to do than deal with some pissant undergrad who she caught cheating. This is academic integrity's problem, and she doesn't want to think about this anymore.

 

I won't give you some bullshit it's your fault deal with it advice. You cheated, so did I in undergrad, big deal nobody cares. What I would do is make sure it doesn't get sent to the honor council/dean of students. If you haven't fucked up before this hopefully should not be too big of a deal. If you are going to cheat in the future, be more discreet and do it only for subjective assignments.

 

No; don't cheat.

I will say that there is a difference between more forgivable gray areas and clear black-and-white cheating. I was one of those students who'd hang out in the lightly-shaded gray areas-- homework study sessions and going as far as whiteboarding stuff, but I'd take a C or even an F before I cheated on an exam or broke a clear honor code. There were kids who knew they could easily get away with cheating on a take-home exam that specified no collaboration (something that was pretty clearly black and white); that was never me.

Unless this is UVA or Princeton and there is a clear honor code that every student follows, OP is accused of more of a gray area, at least as far as industry sees it. (To be sure, what he actually did was pretty black and white). Normally I'd fight it, but there's too much risk. Just take responsibility and plead guilty.

 
Most Helpful

piling on what everyone else is saying. indiscretions are inevitable in life. maybe you get a little too friendly with your girlfriend's sister at a party, maybe you fuck up a pending deal by leaking it, maybe you take a shortcut that's marginally legal. those will often get you just first order penalties. what fucks you in the arse forever is LYING.

clinton didn't get impeached because he got a hummer from a secretary, nixon didn't resign because of watergate, those things happened because of the cover up. if you come clean, they can't get you for the cover up. if I were you, I would be completely transparent, direct, and ask for forgiveness.

"I know I screwed up, I don't expect you to forget what happened, but I wanted to explain myself so you know I'm not hiding anything. I've been overwhelmed this semester because of [list a couple of reasons) and I've clearly not been managing my time well. when it came time to do this assignment, I was having a lot of difficulty doing it and started searching around the internet for solutions. In a moment of weakness, I did what I did. it was wrong, it was stupid, and it was unethical. I hope you see this as a mistake that won't be repeated. and again, while I can't expect you to forget, I would hope you give me a second chance. I'll gladly take the punishment of a 0 and retake the class or do whatever else the honor board requires."

 
thebrofessor:
piling on what everyone else is saying. indiscretions are inevitable in life. maybe you get a little too friendly with your girlfriend's sister at a party, maybe you fuck up a pending deal by leaking it, maybe you take a shortcut that's marginally legal. those will often get you just first order penalties. what fucks you in the arse forever is LYING.

clinton didn't get impeached because he got a hummer from a secretary, nixon didn't resign because of watergate, those things happened because of the cover up. if you come clean, they can't get you for the cover up. if I were you, I would be completely transparent, direct, and ask for forgiveness.

"I know I screwed up, I don't expect you to forget what happened, but I wanted to explain myself so you know I'm not hiding anything. I've been overwhelmed this semester because of [list a couple of reasons) and I've clearly not been managing my time well. when it came time to do this assignment, I was having a lot of difficulty doing it and started searching around the internet for solutions. In a moment of weakness, I did what I did. it was wrong, it was stupid, and it was unethical. I hope you see this as a mistake that won't be repeated. and again, while I can't expect you to forget, I would hope you give me a second chance. I'll gladly take the punishment of a 0 and retake the class or do whatever else the honor board requires."

"Sorry it's been so difficult for you this semester. If you would've spoke up, we could have helped you. Thanks for your transparency, but we have no choice but to terminate your admission. We wish you best."

 
iBankedUp:

"Sorry it's been so difficult for you this semester. If you would've spoke up, we could have helped you. Thanks for your transparency, but we have no choice but to terminate your admission. We wish you best."

This is what it pretty much may be. The academic integrity board could just be the entity that gives the judgment rather than weighing any last pleas for mercy.

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 
thebrofessor:
piling on what everyone else is saying. indiscretions are inevitable in life. maybe you get a little too friendly with your girlfriend's sister at a party, maybe you fuck up a pending deal by leaking it, maybe you take a shortcut that's marginally legal. those will often get you just first order penalties. what fucks you in the arse forever is LYING.

This is key.

"If you always put limits on everything you do, physical or anything else, it will spread into your work and into your life. There are no limits. There are only plateaus, and you must not stay there, you must go beyond them." - Bruce Lee
 

Jesus can we please offer this guy some solutions? Owning up, feeling bad, blah blah comes AFTER you deal with getting the best possible decision you can out of the academic integrity group. Worst case is getting kicked out so you might as well do everything you can to avoid otherwise.

In the perspective of the academic integrity group, cheating on homework is likely on the lower end of severity in the realm of cases they deal with. The un-disputable fact is that you cheated on ONE homework assignment. The story you have to construct is that this is an exceptional case of desperation from an otherwise honest, hardworking student who has tried all other avenues to remedy the situation.

If you have any records of going to tutors or the TA office prior to the incident, collect them and have them ready so you can prove you've made reasonable efforts to learn the material via honest channels. If you have a good relationship with tutors, TA's, or other professors who can vouch for you and say you are honest, hardworking, and very much redeemable from this situation, ask them to write an email or contact the integrity office. Also, present a plan of rehabilitation and you need to seem GENUINE on this. IDK what kind of plan that would entail but if there are steps of improvement with accountability involved, it helps your case.

Hang in there. There are FAR WORSE cases of bad actors who have been able to redeem themselves through careful planning and clever storytelling. Know your audience, have a plan, act as genuine as possible. Good luck :)

Oh yeah, and obviously act as if you feel really bad about it and own up to the mistake. It helps if you really believe it but if not, practice your guilty face in the mirror a few times.

Created a 1-step skincare solution for men. Purchase + reviews appreciated: www.w34th.com
 

Getting your TA to vouch for you can really make a difference. When I was a sophomore during one of my midterm exams, there were two girls who were talking to each other with their exams still out while everyone else was getting up to turn in their exams. The professor caught them talking, and was about to take disciplinary measures against both of them when our TA, really sweet guy who genuinely cared about his students, stepped in and vouched that these two girls were "good and honest students" and got the professor to agree to look for any jarring similarities between their exams before taking any disciplinary action against them.

 

Everyone is so high and mighty on the internet lol. Let's be honest, we've all cheated at some point in our academic lives. What matters is whether it's habitual, then there's a problem that WILL catch up to you.

 

If this is your first (caught) offense, I doubt you'll get expelled. Suspended? Maybe. But I'd be very surprised if they gave you the boot. Own up to it and ask what you can do to prove yourself. Most importantly, just stop cheating. Even if you don't get caught, you're increasingly becoming a shittier person at every cheat iteration. Don't be a weasel.

If this is not your first offense then I have no sympathy.

Good luck and move on. Dusting yourself off after getting down in the dirt is a crucial part of life. I hope you become a better/more productive person as a result of this.

 

Look, you can't hire people to do your homework for you. I take a pretty lenient view on homework collaboration, but you have to submit your own solution.

Also are you sure this was homework or was it a take-home exam? Was it open-book? Cheating on a closed-book exam sounds more serious.

There would be some ways to defend yourself or at least mitigate this if you had just found and copied it off of GitHub, but there's too much risk when you hired someone else to do it for you. This is like getting a 15 mph over speeding ticket half an hour after you got away from a high speed chase. Just check the box on the back of the speeding ticket and mail the check in.

I say just smile, plead guilty or whatever and eat it-- and move on with your life. It's a frigging homework assignment. At least it wasn't an exam. This won't destroy your life and it will really irritate the people who want you to suffer for it. (If you get caught cheating on an exam, or in some incredibly clear black-and-white area as an interviewer, I don't want to work with you.)

Consider yourself lucky. (1) copying from GitHub on a homework isn't as bad as hiring someone else to do your homework (2) you're a kid (3) you didn't get caught selling drugs, which is what a lot of college kids get caught doing (4) academics aren't as ruthless as corporations, FINRA, or the SEC.

If you can get caught doing stuff like this, you will get caught again. The US takes cheating a lot more seriously than most countries besides maybe Northern Europe. So don't do it.

 

Exactly. There's too much risk. Just eat it and treat this as a nice plea bargain.

Now, as the resident forum troll, there is part of me that's pissed off by how the prof handled this whole situation if all she did was find your solution on Github. As someone from industry, people routinely google and copy and paste public stuff from Stacktrace and open-source projects all the time. The really smart ones just import the libraries. It's more maintainable, and you get a lot more credit for reusing code than you do than building stuff from scratch.

If you ask a coding question for a homework problem and the answer is easily available online (probably because you took the question from an open source dev), it's not right to run around calling it plagiarism, unless you want people to start asking where you got the original question/problem from.

But... if I were a prof, and I knew you were farming out your homework assignments, but also that the answer was copied from GitHub, this is how I'd handle the situation, do you a favor and kinda sorta bail you out. (And to be sure, there are some ways to figure this stuff out). There's too much risk to fighting it, and in this case a lot more downside than upside.

Nobody from industry is going to string up a college kid for plagiarizing the answer to a homework assignment from an open-source project. On the other hand, the prof is technically right from the perspective of academia, and you probably deserve to get called out for this on some level.

Personally, I'd smile, say thank you, and move on. (And always kinda wonder how she caught you-- whether it was plagiarism detection software or whether she got tipped off by someone from freelancer.com. If it was freelancer.com, she did you a huge favor. )

 

Admit to it. Trust me. If u battle, the integrity office will burry you. They want to see if you're sorry and u won't don't again. If you act like a typical defensive snowflake that "knows his rights" and attempt to defend with a lawyer or personal friend of family with power/money they will have no problem kicking you out, not refunding your money and finding another exchange student to collect money from. Millions of kids waiting for a chance to have like you do. Don't fuck it up

 
Gibbs:

I think culturally, foreigners don't understand how seriously plagiarism/cheating is taken in the US higher education system. Conversely, I think Americans don't understand how lightly cheating is taken in other countries.

And then everyone abroad wonders why people want to invest and keep their intellectual property here, or at least in Protestant Europe.
 
IlliniProgrammer:
Gibbs:

I think culturally, foreigners don't understand how seriously plagiarism/cheating is taken in the US higher education system. Conversely, I think Americans don't understand how lightly cheating is taken in other countries.

And then everyone abroad wonders why people want to invest and keep their intellectual property here, or at least in Protestant Europe.

I know what you mean and agree with you. But Bavaria is mostly Catholic.

 

Go with ''I'm a moron, I should have never done that, I will take whatever punishment you decide to inflict on me''.

Never discuss with idiots, first they drag you at their level, then they beat you with experience.
 

My advice is to be a man, and be honest about it. Tell them you've learned your lesson, and will do whatever it takes/face any punishment to stay in the program, and improve your performance. It's a lot better to be straight as opposed to cry how you were overwhelmed by the rigor and effed by the consultant. It's school, you're there to learn.

 

My university had this five-page "honor code" they (allegedly) made us read every term, outlining what was defined as violation of academic integrity. A group of guys in my class got busted for forging hours and signatures on a volunteering slip, and actually got off after making a huge case that the fineprint never said anything about forgery (unbelievable). So have a look at your school's "academic integrity" booklet and see if you can style the situation into a smart-ass loophole. Remember, to succeed in life it's more important to be "smart", not intelligent.

 

I'm not sure trying to weasel out based on fine print is a smart move at all here. Bomb's gone off, and I'm 99% certain "copying shit" is going to be covered somewhere in that honor code. At this point, best solution is to confess, explain, atone, redirect.

It's like the story of the marine who was caught sleeping at his post and then denied it. The sleeping was a minor offense, but the cover-up / mendacity was seen as a character trait that couldn't be acceptable under any circumstance.

Cover-ups can sometimes hurt you more than the crime. In this case, they have OP dead to rights and it's 100% clear he cheated. Time to face up and redirect the anger.

 

Funny how this became such an "american" post.. This convo would have been much better if the guy didn't say he was an "international".

I'm pretty sure that those freelancers don't profit only from internationals but from US students as well.

Programmers copy paste the shit out of everything and that's why sites like github exist. Basic freelancer apps are copy pasted again and again and sold by freelancers because things work simply.

Dummy op didn't find the solution himself on github and take the time to own the code a bit and rewrite in his own style. Plain googling like every student does. Poor cheating...

There's no magic solution. Show remorse and if it doesn't work you'll have no choice but to restart elsewhere

US academics system pushed you too hard? Lol. What about École Polytechnique? As if that would be easier

If you speak to a board or sth, choose your words better

 

I think the best for you to do is be honest and say that you have made a mistake after secumming to immense pressure. Outline how the importance of you being guilty is something you are prepared to make up for and do the time.

Explain explicitly the reason you want to remain on the course and that any punishment should be not in a position to have you fail the program. Failing that assessment should be what is handed to you in my opinion and not the actual exam/final assessment.

After all - you're human and made an error. Plead for your place man show passion!

Corp. Fin. Analyst currently working two finance jobs (and a teaching gig and trying to save my music production solo career). I love avocado's. And yes Cape Town is the most beautiful place in the world. Don't believe me, come thru and find out.
 

Since you were the one who posted this, I am very inclined not give you any sympathy at all.

https://www.wallstreetoasis.com/forums/what-the-fuck-should-i-do-with-m…

However, because I have had friends that have gone through the same thing. A question first. Do you like CS? you need to know what you really like to do and what you don't like to do. No matter what, do not, and I repeat, do not, ever get other people to do your homework for you. I am sure you know that now. In advice contrary to what some of these people have said, no disrepect or insult intended, but don't cheat. Period. It won't help you now (as you can see), or in the long run. I would do what Njabulo Vincent-Hadebe said.

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CS is one of those areas where cheaters are often caught, because it is so easy to use machines to cross-reference code. A CS professor at Stanford once shared that the CS department caught more cheaters than all the other departments combined - not because they had more cheaters, but simply because they had automated tools that made it so easy to automatically check code and identify cheating.

At this point, the bomb has gone off already. As you may know, many schools have zero tolerance policies for cheating, so you need to deal with the reality of the situation head-on. For many in the world, this would be a minor thing, but for schools it can be everything, as if a major capital crime had been committed.

First - you will only be making things worse by trying to cover it up. So you now need to confess to your crime, and explain that this is highly out of character for you and that it was a momentary lapse of judgment given the extreme stress you're under. Hopefully they will be understanding (we're all human and school is very tough).
Given that it's CS, and that they have your code, they've got you "dead to rights" so you need to tell them you take full responsibility.

Second - Convince them that this will never, ever happen again, and that you would like remedial work or other means of atonement.

Third - Try to divert their attention away from punishment and towards their academic instinct to help you. Let them know that you recognize that a better way would have been to actually deal with the underlying problem, and ask them for help - some tutoring or mentorship or other assistance. Remind them that you went to office hours first, and tried to sort the problem legitimately.

 
As you may know, many schools have zero tolerance policies for cheating, so you need to deal with the reality of the situation head-on.

Cheating on homework is like underaged drinking. Ok it might be weird at Bob Jones or Brigham Young, but most big state schools almost expect it on some level. Just don't cheat on exams.

This is a situation where OP needs to apologize, but he does not need to show up wearing a sackcloth. Obviously there's too much risk in fighting this, but I think the best way out is to acknowledge that the school has an honor code, and that it takes it seriously, even on homework.

You need to take this seriously, but letting them make a bigger deal of it than it really is means you're giving away too much. Nobody gets 15 years in the slammer for underaged drinking, and for cheating on a homework assignment, you don't need to humiliate yourself or make a big deal out of it (unless they are making a big deal of it)

Are you sure this is the school for you? On the one hand, just about any school would be pissed at a student literally farming out homework assignments (which is what you did, but also they don't know that). On the other hand, most profs at UIUC, had they known the awful truth, would have handled a situation involving copying homework by giving you a zero (and going back over your other homework to see if it was you or someone else) or maybe reducing your grade in the class by one full letter.

That's as far as this would have gone, because UIUC is not insane.

 

A lot of noise in this thread. some of it good, a lot of it stupid. A few brief points from someone who served on my undergrad advisory board for student conduct:

  1. Own it. You did it. No one forced you to do and if you say that line you started this post with, you will be laughed out of the room. Millions of people are in the American education system, they all don't cheat.
  2. Talk about how you have learned from this incident. No half ass responses either. you have to make the Academic Integrity Board know that you have learned your lesson and won't be doing it again.
  3. Some Boards would allow witnesses to speak about your character. if that is the case, find a professor or some adult that you work closely with who could speak to your character. the hope here would be for the Board to see that you made a mistake and this isn't a greater sign of problems to come.
  4. Accept the result and move on with your life. I have no idea what your school's punishment system is. Some schools it is a multiple offense process and your first strike isn't a big deal. if that's the case, consider yourself lucky, learn your lesson, and don't be stupid again.
 

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Array
 

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