After many long months of slaving in front of your computer and work desk trying to hash out the latest model of innovation or research paper, you feel you are finally prepared to deliver what may be the best work of your education life.
However, on the day you are supposed to have it handed in you are shocked to find out that an exact copy of your work has ALREADY been handed in some days before! Nothing really compares to the shame, embarrassment, shock and heart ache that you must be experiencing at that moment to realize that your hard earned efforts have resulted in absolutely nothing and knowing that even if you did try to hand in your work, it would probably be branded as an effort of plagiarism. Even if you did try to appeal it would take ages to rectify this problem and your credibility as a student would still be in question.
This is the very unfortunate reality that affects a number of students at some of point of their tertiary education life and many find themselves at a loss on what to do when it comes to dealing with issues like this. Most of them only comfort themselves in the thought that it only happens to “people other than me”, only to be in for a rude shock when they find that they are next on the list.
Here are some helpful hints and tips on how to deal with such problems and better yet, prevent them from happening in the first place:
Leave Your Mark
The author cannot stress this point further by pointing out that students should have the habit of marking their work with their own identifier. This is especially true of arts, design and modeling students (engineering). The designs that you have created should be watermarked by a logo of your making on every piece of design work that you have done. If using a logo watermark is not your thing, then a signature of your work would suffice, or even digital representation of your initials would suffice. For those doing a project paper, always be sure to leave your name on every page of your work in the form of headers or footers. This is not an exercise in vanity, but merely to protect your work from being directly lifted from one source and into another’s.
Make It A Date
Sometimes, just leaving your identifier is not quite enough because it doesn’t really tell anyone who came first. Another effective supplement to your efforts at protecting yourself is to attach a date next to your watermark or name to indicate when the piece of work was completed. Even if it is only partially completed, be sure to have the date updated from time to time as you continue to accomplish milestones or goals in your work. Having the date present along with your watermark will remove any disputes regarding who came first and who came later.
Keep Your Drafts Handy
When in doubt of the process, as some other students might have employed the use of outsourced efforts to accomplish the same goal as yours, always be sure to keep copies of your draft works in a safe place. Have them attached to your final finished work to demonstrate that you were there every step of the way. This will put a stop to copycat work as they would not have the drafts to back their word. Of course, that being said, you ought to keep your drafts in a safe and discreet place until you are ready to have them attached to your main portfolio of work.
Always Make Doubles
In rare cases, the author has heard of situations where students have had their work not only stolen, but the original destroyed in case a comparison is made! Now nefarious TV soap drama parallelisms aside here, this is a very serious ethical crime and should not be ignored. Reports need to be made if possible. Of course, since you don’t have the originals left to prove that it was indeed destroyed, there is very little that you can do to recover from this situation unless you already had some drafts to continue the work from or someone who serves as a witness to your final work when making an appeal. This is why it is always wiser to prevent situations like this from happening by actually making copies of your work stored in separate places.
Some might consider this as paranoia acting up, but IT students have cleverly labeled this practice as “backing up one’s work”. Backing up your work is always a good thing even when dealing with more mundane work threatening sources like power failures, fire or water damage, theft, or even computer viruses. Be sure to bring only the copy and not the original for progress updates. This reduces the possibility of your work being copied, especially if you left the disk overnight for the supervisor to view it. More about this is explained in the next entry.
Now You See It, Now You Don’t
Some students have a knack for spotting an opportunity when they see one, and despite your best efforts your work still gets copied somehow. It may be possible that the problem lies in your formatting of your work. Whenever delivering partially done work for your supervisor to comment on in mid-semester, it is always a good idea to leave it in the form of a read-only document or artwork. Disable any content changing feature and disallow access from others by using password protection which is only made available to you and your supervisor. For documentation, it is in fact a good idea to present your work in locked PDF format so that those viewing will not be able to cut-and-paste, print, or even alter your work in any way. After all, the supervisor is only there to see your work and make comments on paper or an alternate word document and never on the original piece itself. Last but not least, the most obvious precaution you should take is never to leave your work lying around all over the place!
Sharing Is Not Always Caring
Some students feel obligated to share whatever they know about a given subject topic with other students to help them along with their work. Though this is a very noble approach, it might be prudent to watch just how much you say about it, especially when it borders on revealing the nature of your work and the secrets behind solving the many various problems that plague your work. Inherent flaws exist in virtually all presented work, and your efforts of having solved them should remain your own and not the privy of others. It is all right to share what is already common knowledge and helping others who are truly stuck in their work, but helping too much might also be hurting their progress as the entire point to tertiary education really is to learn how to find information on your own.
Your Work, Your Responsibility
As mentioned above, no one else is responsible for your work other than yourself. The more you request for the assistance from others, the more exposed your work becomes. The more people that know about it, the harder it becomes for you to actually pinpoint who the culprit is behind your stolen work before it is too late. This is not to mention that by asking others for help too much, they would be able to track your progress and may even feel threatened if you are doing too well. This might lead to potential sabotage and stolen work. Some may even consider you being too haughty and arrogant by showing off your work, while others may consider you to be too much of a bother. Do everyone a favor and just finish it by yourself.
Mum’s The Word
As a summary to the above two points, just remember that the safest practice is often to not say anything at all about your work. Conversely, you can try focusing on how they are doing instead, or if pressed, just mentioning that it is coming along fine with the occasional problem or two. Just remember that what separates your work from others even in the event of copied work is how well you know your material and present it when compared to others. Knowledge and information is the one thing you can keep locked away, key and all, in the recesses of your mind. As long as you don’t let others in on it, there is no reason they would be able to copy your presentation style or presentation material.
Resolve and Dissolve
Heated confrontations in college and university life are very, very common, if not an every day event. It is possible that there is coincidences in both your works that it appears that you are copying each other and that either or both of you may have realized that way before the hand in date. That probably leads to arguments on who should continuing with the project or “give way”. Sometimes it’s just better to walk away and let it resolve by itself, but if that’s not possible, take time out to sit the other offended party down and have a frank conversation about how your work is conflicting with one another. Simple compromise is often the key and it is a lot easier if the both of you discussed on how you could change certain content to make it appear sufficiently different from one another. It is very rare that the objectives actually clash to the extent of producing perfectly matching work. Even so, they should not have been approved by the supervisors in the first place! In the event of an honest mistake, the student should try approaching the supervisor for some advice on how to resolve this clash in an amicable manner.
Better Late Than Never
Let’s just say that your work has been copied completely and there’s simply no way to recover from this. Inform the supervisor and buy some time to redo the final portion again. This is especially effective if the opposing side refuses to back down and insists that their work is the original. Instead of just completely giving up and complaining about how bad the semester’s been, just hand in the work over the holidays. The deadline for moderation only occurs well into the 2nd or 3rd week of the holidays and not immediately after the final presentation date, most of the time. If need be, do your presentation on your project paper or art work prior to the actual handing in of the “revised” version.
Some feel that helping them out just once would be a good approach in dealing with copycats. In some cases it might work, but this approach is no longer popular considering that copycats have a tendency to become addicted to copying after a while. They are not called copycats otherwise. 
One way to teach a copycat a lesson is probably to wait till an urgent examination comes up and conveniently arrange for your seat to be changed from him right before the exam. All his plans on copying you are now foiled and he has to fend for himself for the next few hours. He may reconsider your reliability as a source of information after that. 
