[FlamesAddiction]

Sometimes I think profs go a little overboard. I was accused of plagarism back in university, but the department head ended up taking my side against the prof. She was downright giddy at the idea that she might have caught someone plagarizing and to have the power to kick them out of school.

I took a field botany course and part of the course requirement was to make a collection of specimens from field samples. The collection had to be displayed with "tags" that included the common and latin names, as well as coordinates of where the specimen was taken. Everyone in the course pretty much had the exact same specimens since we collected most of our specimens on field trips.

To make the labelling easier, I used the WORD template wizard so that I wouldn't have to re-type all of the headers over and over. Another classmate thought this was a good idea and asked me how to do it, but instead of showing them how, I just thought it would be easier to let them use the template I made. Needless to say, when we printed off our labels, they looked pretty close to the each other (fonts were set to default).

A few days later, both I and the other student received an email from the prof saying we plagarized each other's work and she demanded to know who copied from whom. Instead of admitting guilt, we arranged a meeting with the department head who agreed that because we didn't share intellectual property and it was really only a formatting issue, it wasn't very serious... he dropped the case. In order to somewhat appease the prof however, we had to make new labels that looked different, which took about 15 minutes.

Although after that, the prof marked use extra hard.