Infographic: How to make a fortune from student plagiarism

On 12th April 2019 China’s prestigious Tsinghua University announced it would expel students who it caught plagiarising in graduation dissertations – ripping off their idea, Evil Stick Man turned both educational poacher and gamekeeper in DG #35…

1. Set up a company in a territory with minimal legal oversight and lots of cheap, talented programmers. Give it a strong anti-cheating name and a jolly animal logo.

2. Hire a team to create software that can compare essays submitted by students with a catalogue of existing academic works and flag up sections which have been copied.

3. Sell it to academic institutions as an anti-plagiarism tool. They will use it to identify students who are not producing original work and discipline or expel them.

4. Once you’ve sold to all the big academic institutions, move your programmers to a new company, with a strong pro-cheating name and a jolly animal logo.

5. Create a program that takes plagiarised essays and inserts changes – hidden white-coloured letters, random punctuation, etc – that make them different enough to fool the plagiarism checker.

6. Sell this to students on the dark web. They will be marked down for poor writing style, but will get great marks for original thought.

7. Move your programmers back to the original company, to create upgraded anti-plagiarism software that can beat your pro-cheating software. Sell the upgrade to the same academic institutions.

8. Continue to alternately upgrade your pro- and anti-cheating software for several years, profiting from both sides.

9. You are now rich. Pay Jacob Rees-Mogg to be your best mate and take him on a lads’ holiday to Magaluf.

We’ve pulled together Evil Stick Man’s adventures in our first ever book, How to be evil. You can buy it for £10 including shipping in our online shop.

Words: Rob Orchard | Illustration: Christian Tate

Posted on Friday, February 7th, 2020 - Categories: Evil Stick Man, Infographics.