If you're going to make the effort anyway......

So I had to teach an 8:30 statistics lab, which is probably a bad idea. I had to do a little blurb about academic integrity. I went over the reasons for not cheating, i.e. never getting into grad school, never getting a government job, it makes kittens cry. But I think I came up with a more persuasive reason.

If you're already going to make an effort, just do your own work. (This is what I told them. I come up with great ideas early in the morning).

In order to cheat, or plagiarize, you have to steal someone else's work. You can't just make something up. If you made something up, you would be a moron, rather than a person with no integrity. In order to have a lack of integrity, you have to actually do something wrong. So I told my class that they might as well just do the work. It takes around the same amount of time to steal someone's work as it does to do your own.

I've never stolen a paper off the Internet, but I assume you have to search for it, and then purchase it. In order to write a paper, you just have to search on the Library's website. I'm pretty sure that I could write a paper in less time than it takes to steal a paper.

So that was my great reason not to cheat. Because cheating takes too much time. I think I might be the Buddha. I must refer to myself as the Enlightened One.