Dear Jethro,

I’m frustrated because my teacher gave me a zero on an essay. All I did was take a few sentences from a friend’s paper to improve mine. How can I make this go away? 

-Distraught 

Dear Distraught,

What you did is called plagiarism, which is a form of cheating. Your teacher gave you a zero because he/she was following school policy. Now, I know that you’re thinking it’s unfair to fail the whole assignment for taking a few sentences from someone else, but any form of cheating is still cheating. It’s the equivalent of using copy-and-paste online. Regardless of how much you plagiarized, you still took the work of someone else and passed it off as your own. As an advice columnist, there’s nothing I can do to change your grade so I can’t make it go away. However, if you’re referring to your feelings of guilt and regret, then I do have a solution for you, and that’s to go to your teacher and apologize. I can’t guarantee that your teacher will change your grade if you do this, but I can guarantee that you’ll feel much better, or you’ll at least feel that a huge weight has been lifted off of your shoulders. Let this be a lesson learned so that next time, you’ll know better than to plagiarize.

Sincerely,

Jethro