In the light of reent events, I can no longer remain silent about this issue except to the few I know. I must speak out and make my voice be heard. In the modern world today when the information is at your fingertips, the temptation to copy and call someone's work your own is great. Before I tell you the two events that triggered my expression, allow me to confess that I have been tempted before, but I have resisted and won the battle. This, in turn, causes me to fail with honor rather than succeed with guilt when I really don't know the material.

The first event came when my English teacher described the teachers' subscription to a service called turnitin.com. It checks your paper against many others to see whether one has plaguarized their work or not. I mourn for the deaths of Trust and Innocence as we must descend this low and treat everybody as if they are criminals. As a matter of fact, it feels that a principle America was founded upon has been destroyed. It is not "innocent until proven guilty," but rather the exact opposite!

This next event is relatively complex, but I shall do my best to describe it. In a Computer Science assignment, we were provided with a Java bytecode file* and we are to write a program using that to make fish come up in a certain sequence and pattern. Now, in the next part, we were provided with the program to do that (in a different pattern) while you write the program that draws the fish provided with these parameters, thus turning the tables. Anyways, from the first keystroke I pressed in making this second part, I know the fact that it is liable to mass cheating. Sure enough, my fears came true -- many students decompiled** the file they were given on the first part, copied and pasted it, and called it their own. As a result, the teacher decided to nullify the grade. Therefore, that made me lose the 100 that I rightfully earned by more than three hours of my own work in SDLC***.

Because of these incidents, I feel wronged, if not indignant. For those of you doing this now, please understand that it is unethical, you are harming yourself in the long run (to put it nicely), and your day of justice will come. When you do come to this udnerstanding, I encourage you to deviate from this and come clean.

* A Java bytecode file is essentially program instructions converted from a format readable to humans to one readable to Sun's Java Runtime.
** Decompiling the program means to render a bytecode file (or any program file) readable by humans. This is usually done to find out how something works and is also called "reverse engineering."
*** SDLC is the Software Development Life Cycle. It is also known as the "waterfall cycle." Here's my own version: 1) Understanding the request; 2) Thinking about how to go about meeting that request; 3) Writing the code; 4) Correcting any errors that may have been produced; 5) Optimizing the code (if there is time); 6) Turning it in