Plagiarism is bad, especially when you're stupid

[Flying Mullet]

So I'm taking some summer school courses for my Master's degree and in one of the courses our midterm assignment is to do peer reviews of other student's work from the first half of the semester. I'm here to provide some protips on what <b>not</b> to do if you feel you must cheat and copy someone else's homework.

• Don't copy someone else's work verbatim - Because you're submitting work electronically, the professor has the opportunity to run a diff on your homework against the other students. When your homework has a 97% match rate with another student, that's not good.
• Don't copy unique, eye-catching words - I read someone's homework regarding a computer algorithm and it mentions how it will help with counter-terrorism. Two papers later I see "counter-terrorism" again. Then again on a third paper. Dumb asses. Did they really think unique words like that won't stand out between papers?
• Don't copy link examples - For one homework we're supposed to give example URLs with our answers. Three papers use the same URLs. And I'm not talking about common ones like Google or Yahoo. I'm talking about obscure web pages and documents buried in random sites. At least change your links.
• Don't be lazy, change the formatting - Three students homework is completely identical, formatting and all: Same line spacing, bolding, italicizing, tabbing, etc...
• <b><i>Last, but not least:</i> Don't copy the dumb kid's homework</b> - Again, four students all turned in identical homework. The problem is that of the two problems on the homework, one had all incorrect answers and the other was only a quarter finished. What were they thinking: "Hey, go copy the stupid kid's homework and we'll turn it in!"

Anyway, I wanted to post this because I couldn't believe how lazy and stupid these students were in their copying of each others work. I understand people will cheat on occasion, but this is just embarrassing. And this is grad school. How they made it this far is beyond me.