Plagiarism In The Mcadoo Case

It's two o'clock in the morning, and a student sits in a dark, quiet bedroom, his face illuminated only by the glow of his laptop. The silence is punctuated by the rhythmic tapping of keys as he struggles through composing the fifth page of the twenty that are required for his research paper due tomorrow morning, only a few short hours away. The student begins the slow, grueling process of paraphrasing and citing his source, when suddenly, a sense of overwhelming fatigue falls over him. Giving up, he copies and pastes the information into his own document, scrambling it a bit before printing it out and shoving it in his binder. A situation like the one this student encountered is not uncommon, but the choice to plagiarize has innumerable consequences

In the McAdoo case, McAdoo faced, among other consequences, suspension from the football team after he was convicted of academic fraud (Kane). "McAdoo's paper first became an issue when the university discovered that he had gotten too much help from a tutor, Jennifer Wiley, who wrote the footnotes and the bibliography for him" (Kane). When the case was reopened, the court discovered that approximately 39% of his paper had been plagiarized, leading to his ejection from the team (Kane). The fraud had been completely neglected by the UNC honor court (Kane), which could have been an innocent mistake, or it may have been intentionally "overlooked" so the college could keep their football player. After he was ejected, not only was his effort wasted, but since he likely attained an athletic scholarship in order to attend the school, he now has lost a large sum of money as

The NCAA ban on McAdoo's eligibility to play football destroyed any possibility of him having a professional athletic career after college (Kane). Jennifer Wiley, McAdoo's tutor, no longer holds her position at the university (Blythe). "Since then, she has been a teacher, but her ties to the Tar Heel football program’s NCAA problems have posed employment challenges, [Wiley's attorney] said" (Blythe). Since McAdoo will not be able to make a career out of football, he must turn to a future in another field, one that will require a college education and will be affected by his record of academic fraud. Most employers will be extremely wary to hire a person without a degree who was expelled from college due to a lack in integrity. Without a well-paying job, McAdoo will struggle to support himself and his family. His actions will haunt him for the rest of his life. As for Wiley, it is unclear whether she was aware that she was out of bounds, but her career was dramatically affected