I am a high school student (junior). Recently I took an extra community college course, where I was accused of cheating, and was suspended. Apparently, they found similarities in my work with that of something on Stackoverflow.
Because this cheating offense was given at a community college and not my actual high school, will it still be reported to the colleges I apply to? If it is, will it affect my chances?
I’m very worried that it may ruin my chances of getting into the colleges that I aim for.
On the CommonApp, you are asked to disclose past disciplinary actions, suspensions, etc. They’ll probably still want it disclosed on there even if the offense in question was not committed at your high school.
Don’t let it stop you from applying to the places that you want to apply to- It certainly won’t boost your chances but it’s hard to tell how much it’ll take them down.
If I’d written this post, and hadn’t cheated, it would have been worded very differently. I don’t know what it is lately, but I’m seeing a lot of posts on CC about cheating, and NONE of the kids are owning it. Such a bummer.
In the age of computer checking, things do get caught more often, but mistakes also happen.
My daughter got caught by a plagiarism checker. We coached her on how to respectfully request a review, and it got straightened out. It turned out she had submitted the paper (online), caught a typo, then resubmitted her work. The resubmission was before the due date, but the course management software had already stored her first one in the database and flagged the second upload.
If you cheated, you’ll need to research how it appears on your transcript and decide how you want to discuss it. If you didn’t, you can make your case with your professor and whatever the appeal process is.
Did you actually cheat? Like the post above, I’ve met people who submitted their papers online and submitted the same thing twice on accident. This made it look like they plagiarized themselves. Also, it’s common for kids to be stupid and forget to enclose an entire quote with that final quotation mark in the end. This could easily be counted as plagiarism, but if you’re proffesor read your essay, they’d see this quick and realize it was a dumb mistake. But if you actually cheated, you’re done. Dead. It’s over.