Actually, “bad” is not the word to characterize plagiarism; better to make it this way: Plagiarizing is an unworthy action with far-reaching consequences because of three reasons:
- It reveals your disrespect to yourself,
- Disrespect to your professor, and
- Your devil-may-care attitude towards your future.
Let’s make a short overlook of these points.
The first one seems to be quite obvious for when plagiarizing you acknowledge your inability to present your point of view concerning a given topic. Roughly speaking, you are too fool to have your own opinion or not enough clever to state it in words. Then you’d better vacate a place for a smarter student who is eager to study and can cope with the tasks. There are some other possibilities: you are too lazy to use your brain or too busy to spend time on thinking and writing, so you prefer to put your name above what was written by somebody else. Maybe, all the three situations look different for you, but they are the same for the university administration. In this or that way, they show that the student has no possibility and desire to study. Then what for make him languish in the university?
The second idea, that is disrespect to the professor, is no less important than the previous one. It goes without saying that each of us protects his own interests, but still try to imagine the feelings of your professor when he understands that this essay was totally or partly copied from the Internet sites. It means that all his efforts spent on explanations, examples, hints are down the drain. The student didn’t want even to try, he just copied and pasted pieces of different articles together, sometimes rather awkwardly. “I had one piece of work so blatantly cut and pasted that it still contained adverts from the web page,” complained one professor from MIT. What would you have done on his place?
Finally, if you don’t care about your reputation and the feelings of your professor, think at least about your future. It’s true that well-done cheating is not easy to recognize, and maybe some two or even three times you’ll be lucky to make it through without been caught. But then you’ll become more and more lazy to do something yourself and sooner or later your professor will find proofs of your dishonesty. At the best, you’ll be warned and asked to rewrite the paper on your own; therefore, an appropriate reputation of a plagiarist will attend you for quite a period of time. If not, you’ll be just expelled from the university with all the ensuing consequences. Isn’t it better to make an effort and write what you think about this or that problem, especially with such a great number of guides to make your work easier?