This is too funny. I don't normally share this story with people, but since this thread is directly related, I may as well entertain you guys.
I'm a firm believer in outsourcing, or spending a bit of money to save myself a lot of time, or headache.
At University I enrolled in an elective subject which sounded interesting at first, but later turned out to be ridiculously boring and not stimulating in the slightest. Assignments throughout the semester were worth a total of 50%, and I struggled to achieve 25% on these.
The final assignment for the year was worth 50% itself, and so I needed to get another 25% to pass. Unfortunately, I had no interest in the subject and many of the given topics seemed ridiculous.
So, I outsourced it.
I looked online for services and eventually narrowed it down to a few services which claimed to be premium level. I provided the topic, paid a premium price and began to relax. Shortly, my assignment was sent to me and it read very well. I was sure it was going to do well.
I did some basic checks, taking random sentences and putting them in to Google to see if any of it was indexed. Everything passed as I expected and I felt it was legitimate. I had no access to the plagiarism tool my University uses (although I did look around online) and so I felt if it wasn't in Google, I had a fairly good chance I couldn't go wrong. The time came and I submitted the assignment. I felt a little anxious, having outsourced such a big portion of my work for that subject - but at the same time I felt somewhat confident that it would turn out well.
Until I got a call from the subject coordinator.
I didn't answer the call, a voicemail was left and I was told there was a 'problem' with my assignment. I was requested to come in for an interview.
At this point, I wasn't feeling too well. You can get in to some serious problems doing this sort of thing, especially when you're at one of the best ranked Universities in the country & world.
I went in for my interview and did my best to greet my coordinator as professionally and respectfully as I could. I did a good job, but there's only so much you can do when the computer screen shown to me was highlighting sections of my assignment which were submitted by another student, in another country, word for word. The person who wrote my assignment must have written an assignment for another student, somewhere else in the world, on a related topic. This content was not indexed in Google, so this I figured happened.
In either case, around half of the paper was in red - which meant that around half was copied from someone or somewhere else. At this point, there's no excuse or explanation. For the coordinator, it was obvious what had happened. Or at least, he thought it was obvious. I am sure he thought I colluded with a friend, or perhaps extracted certain parts of the paper from the internet. Had he known I paid someone to write it, perhaps my slap on the wrist would have been a little more serious.
I was instructed to rewrite the paper and resubmit it. If successful, at maximum I would get a pass, which would equate to 50% of the assignments total value. Since the assignment was worth 50%, I would only get a maximum of 25% of that if the resubmit was successful. I needed to get that 25% to just scrape through.
But it gets better
As if I had not already messed up big time, I did yet another outrageously stupid thing.
I was still a firm believer in saving time, outsourcing and still am. As you'll see now, it appears my desire for saving time had very little limit.
I took the plagiarised submission, put it into The Best Spinner, and replaced every word I could with a synonym. Sure, I could have been bad ass and let it do it automatically, but I'll admit - I sat there, manually picking out the best synonyms for every word I could find. In the end, the paper read well - but if you put the two side to side, you'd realise that they were identical, one just using synonyms of the other.
Needless to say, I'll be careful about choosing boring subjects of no real value in the future. I also won't be outsourcing my University work again. Enjoy.
