Plagiarism - SNL 

You think this is comedy until you start to teach

I had 2 students turn in the same paper once.

True story: high school kid who tries to pass the lyrics to « Imagine » by John Lennon for his own poem 😂😂😂

I'm a professor who has seen it all, just like in this skit. Once, a COLLEGE student submitted a paper to me with the watermark of the essay-writing company across every page. I'm guessing it was a free sample.

who else noticed at 5:10 he straight up caught that phone that was impressive

Ashton Kutcher is literally just playing Kelso from that 70s Show

When I taught community college English I would buy an essay from the web, hand it out and we'd score it together. Always earned a D or F from them. "No need to cheat when you can do better than this, right?" The plagiarism stopped.

Wow, this is like the calmest teacher ever in this situation...

I took a Research and Writing class at Augusta University. The entire grade depended on the paper you wrote. One student submitted a paper. The professor, Dr. Calahine, was grading papers when she came to this student's. She read about half-way down the page, put an "F" on it, and went to the next paper in the stack. After she had passed back the papers, the student in question went to her office angry and demanded to know why she got an "F." Dr. Calahine reached back, took a book off her shelf, and showed the student were she had copied word-for-word. The book...was written by Dr. Calahine.

"shouldn't read other ppls emails dude." 😂😂😂

I like how Parnell is playing the teacher. He isn't over selling it or trying to steal the scene with his character. Each person is playing off of each other. Nice work and believable!

The teacher staying calm and not getting angry is what makes this sketch

DAMN, seth nailed the douchey early 2000's look so well.

When I was in highschool I had a huge essay to write so I decided to use my older sisters essay that she had written when she was in my grade. The funny part is that I got an A on it while she got a C, it still pisses her off to this day whenever I bring it up.

They totally nailed the reactions teenagers have when you confront them with solid evidence.

When I was in college, I paid a friend of mine, WHO ALSO TAUGHT ENGLISH AT THE SAME SCHOOL, to write a literature essay for me. The paper got an A minus. I was thrilled--he was pissed off about the minus.

There was a girl at my old highschool who painted a portrait for a project and was proud of it so she uploaded it to a website before she turned it in. she was suspended for plagiarism. eventually she told them its her painting and the name of the account that they thought she plagiarized from was literally her name.

I think Seth's biggest mistakes were either printing in color... or his hair.

I once had a student put a random sentence in the middle of a paper that claimed I didn’t read all of the papers turned in. The student was trying to see if I would catch it. The sentence was technically correct but I would never admit it.

I was a 7th grade science teacher in 1997 and during our unit on the animal kingdom, I had each student do a report on an animal. I had a student stand in front of the class and read word-for-word the encyclopedia entry for "Wales". Worse, no one in the room but me noticed that he wasn't doing a report on "Whales." He talked about Welsh customs and architecture and stuff like that. I wasn't the best teacher in the world; it was my first semester.

My first year teaching, the first plagiarized paper I caught was - no joke- an essay on ethics.

5:10 He actually didn't cheat, he just blatantly didn't do the assignment.

imagine being a teacher but also owning a website that provides written work papers for the same assignments that you give... You would have some wonderful days at work

So true! I experienced this while teaching college! It was so bad that I collaborated with the librarian to create a mini class on plagiarism. I made them take the class on their own time for credit. It did help.

Ahh the days before turnitin.

“Because you like to be wrong”

The opposite of this happened to me. When I was in senior year, I submitted a digital self portrait (made from tiny images of my favourite CD covers, like pixels to make an image of my face.) It was not the best thing ever, but for the 2000s I thought it was pretty damn good for a teenager. My Art teacher was old school and thought digital art was bullshit, my final grade was a D... The kicker... The very next year, after I graduated, my little sister brought home the new Student Journal, and on the front cover was my dumb face looking all inquisitive into the distance... THE SAME SUBMISSION THEY THOUGHT WAS BAD ENOUGH TO GRADE A D, THEY THEN THOUGHT WAS A GOOD ENOUGH TO REPRESENT THE ENTIRE SCHOOL THE NEXT YEAR...

3:40 that backhand hi five looks hella hurting bros

Amy Poehler And Ashton Kutcher look so Young.

I just wish when my students knew enough to remove the hyperlinks from text they copy off the internet...

It’s 2023 & ChatGPT walks into the room.

In college lab classes I teach, I have had students copy, verbatim, what I wrote in the lab manual (an entire paragraph) and turn that in as part of their lab report (somewhere near the middle), even though I've told them in no uncertain terms that they must submit their own work and can't copy anything. Apparently they thought I wouldn't notice my own writing.

One of my male students turned in a paper he'd gotten from the net in which the author talked about what she did with her husband. So I asked him "how's your husband?" in front of the whole class. He said "I don't have a husband!" Then I opened his paper and read it out. After the laughter died down, I told him he shouldn't be copying essays off the internet without reading them properly.

Chris Parnell was an underrated SNL cast member in my personal expert opinion

There was a tiny window of about 5yrs you could get away with this. 97’ to 02’ this is when many of the teachers from the 60’s and 70’s were just about to retire and had zero computer skills lol

Ashton and Seth make the perfect naughty duo in any school setting

I'm reminded of a class I took a long time ago. We had to read our persuasive essays in front of the class. Some jock figured he'd be slick and plagiarize someone else's work. However he couldn't even be bothered to at least take a few minutes to skim through it before class. In the middle of presenting views which were supposedly his own, he paused for a moment and said "Well, I don't know about THAT." Another brilliantly conceived plan that inexplicably failed to work.

“Maybe they copied my paper” “I don’t think they did”

It's amazing to see how far these actors have come.

Reminds me when some guys copied my homework when I was a little kid. They were standing behind me and thought I didn't notice. I made 4 math problems wrong on purpose. I erased the answer and corrected when they left. One idiot asked the teacher why I had all right but he had 4 wrong without looking at my graded paper. Lol

Parnell's voice is just buttery smooth. I could listen to him read ingredients for cereal.

As a former teacher, this is a pretty accurate representation of what goes on in classrooms. It really isn't comedy; it is reality.

I once had a student who handed a paper copied and pasted from wikipedia, he did't even delete the hyperlinks.

I have actually lost count on how many times I’ve watched this 😂😂😂 hilarious

No joke, my English teacher actually had us watch this when we were talking about plagiarism in our writing pieces; I still watch this to this very day 😂

At 0:57 I was genuinely expecting Ashton to say 'BURN!!!'

In one of my college math courses, the professor made our final a take home exam. Immediately, one student posted the question on a math forum site and the professor replied to it. It was so funny.

the irony of this lmao

I refuse to believe that grad school professors actual read 50 page papers from a class of 30-40 students. All they do now is run them through the plagiarism checkers. My thesis was absolute crap and I still ended up with an A in the class.

I'm not going to lie, but this is one of the best skits ever.

in high school, i was in AP English my last 2 years and we had to churn out an essay in 40 minutes often. Timed writes are a part of the AP exam so we had to really get good at improvising a literary analysis

I have actually lost count on how many times I’ve watched this hilarious

I'd like to say this is an exaggeration, but I've really had plagiarists who genuinely were this mind-numbingly stupid and worse.

Back when Amazon was just an online book store lol

Had some people in my programming class that were really smart. We received instructions and examples what the output should look like. They hardcoded the examples and expected a passing grade.

I love how this went from plagiarism to impersonating a photographer 😂😂😂

Am a college professor. Can confirm this happens on the reg. Often just as dumb.

I’m showing this to all of my students next year.

It’s Jerry from Rick and Morty!!

Honestly I didn't think the video was funny until that joke at 6:09- literally made me fall over laughing.

“Because you like to be wrong?” I died at that part. 😂

8 years later, this is still my go to guideline for "How not Plagiarize for dummies".

This teacher deserves a raise

The best SNL skit ever.

My chemistry teacher my junior year had everyone write a research paper on the periodic table, and kids did stuff almost exactly like this. Including things like "see graph below" with no graph in their paper

My student submitted a paper to me that had this phrase inside, "to purchase the book by abc author on xyz topic, click here". Another student submitted a paper to me with those reference numbers in brackets [23] etc, and I asked him in class, "I did not see the citations associated with the numbers, and also the numbers are not in order," Of course he had no idea what those numbers represent, just wanted to know if I could get a funny response in turn. Also, during university, my classmate was short of material to meet the total wordings in his essay. So he started quoting a cricket match that he had seen. He didn't expect the teacher would actually read through the 100+ submitted essays. So, when his essay was read aloud in class, we had real fun.

As a former teacher myself.... this was so well done! And accurate!

I used to write papers for students in high school to make money. Usually around $25-$50 a paper depending. One of the ones I wrote was really good and later in college I went back, found it, reworked it a little and submitted it since it was aplicable to the class / assignment. I had forgotten it was one of the papers I had written and sold and apparently the student I sold it too had uploaded it online to one of those websites where you can buy papers so HE could make money off it. My teacher (sort of) discovered this. I couldn’t really explain that it WAS my own paper and words because I probably would have just incriminated myself further. Plagiarism inception.

That pretty much sums up the US high school education.

2:50 Took me a long to recognize that was Seth Meyers

IN MY VIEW Funny and true-to-life teacher student interactions. I loved this skit.

3:30 Serious Trump vibes in that reaction... :D

Little did we know kirsty would turn herself around and become parks commissioner of Pawnee

I like how he even gets frustrated at how little they try to even cheat

Chris Parnell makes this skit. He’s a freaking legend

One of my writing mentors got bad grades on his poems in school. So he turned in one of Allen Ginsberg's as his own. Got the same bad grade. (Fun note: he also went on to become an award-winning poet)

I wish my students cared enough to plagiarize. As it is, I have to read their stream of consciousness gibberish of disconnected, amorphous, half-formed thoughts.

Amazing how even though this skit aired in 2003, it’s all still relevant today in 2019. What I mean is, not a single website entity he referenced is defunct or sounds dated today. I assumed this maybe aired around 2014/15... so I was surprised just how old it was.

This reminds me of standing outside my English class before a test and seeing students reading the spark notes on their phones because they didn't read anything we were about to get tested on.

Amy and Seth are just amazing i love their chemistry

I'm sure this is all too painfully true for some teachers and professors.

One of my students plagarised an essay, what I did was circle each section and just wrote the website URLs next to them.

That smack at 3:41 is heavenly

The really hysterical part is when kids believe that they are actually smarter than their teachers. Even when I was in school I knew how genuinely stupid that was.

The teacher reminds me of my high school calculus teacher

My partner never studied or wrote any essays for law school. Instead, he'd go into the library, pretend to be teachers assistant and flirt with the girls at the front desk to get access to the teachers storage. He'd go back into the teaching files and copy stuff from students that had graduated 10-20yrs ago (so the teacher wouldn't remember the papers and recognize he was cheating), and he'd make copies of the tests so that when test day came, he could just copy the answers he wrote on a paper he hid.. Then he'd spend his free time playing basketball. My partners a defense attorney.

Are you psychic? Me: Are you kidding me?

It's how teens looks to the adults when they are being too obvious but think they are outsmarting them

Oh crap, that's Seth Meyers!

Is this what school is like, I've forgotten since the quarantine started

The way Amy poehler passes the phone been very discrete and careful not to draw any suspicious from her teacher 6 feet in front of her 😂😂😂

I actually like writing essays because they're actually pretty easy once you get the formula down.

2:38 He's writing that down. :D

Is this the school Toby Maguire's spider-man went to?

I freaking hated English class😂 Creative writing was fun, but those book reports! There's only so many ways I can rephrase "Johnny went to the store" and talk about it for a 1,000 words.

I wrote all my wife’s college papers. It was funny watching her trying to explain her paper to the teacher that she hadn’t even bothered to read, let alone write.

We didn't have the internet when I went to school but a jackass classmate of mine stole a program I wrote in 1986 in the 11th Grade and turned it into the Dean of Engineering in college for his Senior Project. I found out because I was going to turn in the same program, it was awesome as hell, I wrote a graphing program that did some Electronics problems that normally takes 2-3 pages to do and it turned out it that in the process of doing it, I created a program that did all Algebra problems and graphed them. I went to do my presentation for the project to the Dean and he told me someone else had already turned it in . To prove it was mine I had him load the program, the idiot that stole it hadn't noticed that I sign my programs by making the first letter of each REM statement spell my name. I spotted it instantly and asked the Dead to write down the first letter of every REM statement. He knew I was telling the truth but he wanted me to make something different anyway instead of turning in something I wrote in high school. I presented the Menu program I wrote for DOS that gave a beautiful menu instead of a prompt when the computer loaded. I had written that for myself years ago as well. Got an A

Then the professor gives exams that are 100% on quizlet verbatim. When the entire class gets A's on every assignment there might be something going on.

Jerry Smith is a good teacher 😂

He's so good