When you’re in an advanced class it’s often hard (being a kid still) to find words to capture your understanding of a more abstract topic. Turning to the internet as a resource I find is very helpful as it puts what you’re thinking into intelligent sentences. Nobody wants to sound like an idiot in an assignment, right?

I found myself in this situation in an advanced science class where we were studying things like advanced isotopic graphs and geochemical readings, and the only way I could really explain what I understood was to put it in plain ‘kid speak’, which I often did to help out struggling friends.

When assignment time came, as I dreaded, the task was to write a ‘half decent’ (meaning about 4 or 5 pages worth) of research and justification into what we learned. Of course subliminally in that question the teacher was actually also asking to put it in scientific language, in adult ways of describing what we learnt. In reality, that whole past term my teacher didn’t find a problem with my teenage explanations, so how come this time was different?

Nevertheless, I turned to the internet for some help on the topic. Of course, I already understood the concepts mentioned in the assignment, I just needed a way to get it out properly. Unfortunately for me the topic I learnt wasn’t widely broadcast on the internet, so I had to look hard. When I did find something, it explained exactly what I was thinking, and reading it thoroughly, it was precisely what I was after.
Now I had to get what this article into my assignment somehow without looking like an idiot, so I tried my best to reword what the author said into my own words. The reality though was that you couldn’t put those words into any other way. It was advanced language, and if I translated it into teen speak, I’d get marked down for bad use of terminology, What could I do?

So I went on and tried to translate as much as I could, but really this source was so good, that if I reworded any part of it, it wouldn’t be correct information anymore. Aware of how heavily I used this source, I referenced this source in my appendix, among others that helped me decipher some of the more difficult language.
I did okay, right?

wrong.

Three weeks later, I get a zero for plagurism. Yet, had my teacher not spotted a sentence and googled it, much like you mentioned, she would have given me full marks. Go figure.
I do not encourage plagurism out of sheer laziness (and it happens a lot), but to penalise a student (with an otherwise clean record) for trying to lift the standard of their language by consulting a professional article, when there really is no other way to word something, is (in my opinion) questionable.

But students must follow the rules in our dictatorship-style education system, or we pay the price. No matter how readily information is available now, it looks like we’re penalised for using it.

My apologies for making a novel out of this.