Help me to hide my intellectual chicanery!

Maybe I do sort of understand my ideas. I'm not even sure.

I suggest you go to the bar and play pool. That's what I did when I was a student.

Ah, doctor Mike. You always know what to do.

Don't you have a copy of what you wrote? If you don't, you should get one. Ask your lecturer if you can borrow it back because you want to check a couple of things. Then prepare yourself for the possibility that they know you've copied it and are just lining up to humiliate you.

Alternatively, you could treat any conversation with the person you copied from as an interview, with you as the interviewer. Answer every question with a question of your own and just pretend that you're really nervous to meet your hero.

Failing that, change your identity and academic discipline.

That's a far better response than my own. Although mine had better beer proximity.

Whatever else you do, make sure you sleep with as many of these academics as possible. They are, for the most part, horrid lovers and the tedium/pain/humiliation you will experience with them sexually will make any academic issues seem..., well, academic in comparison. Beer and pool is an excellent suggestion as well, though I tend toward champagne and pinball.

ooh ooh, you could just tell them that your ideas are too complex to explain any further to them. You need your paper hack so you can write an easier to understand version or some such nonsense.

If you kept up with grand prix racing, you'd know that a chicane is a sharp twist or curve in the racecourse, hence chicanery is a sort of willful twistiness.

As for what you've done, I derive a certain Nelson-Muntz-like satisfaction from contemplating it. However, I strongly suspect you are merely quoting us the bad plot of a tv pilot, rather than citing your personal experience. Your tale is suspiciously lacking in detail.

For example, what is your "field" and who are some of these avante-garde figures in it?

(bowing to the brilliance of the pool playing advice...)

(Going off to play pool with Clellie, whilst drinking a beer and remembering my first "collegiate" paper, which I kind of made-up [to the point of quoting non-existent books] because I'd forgotten about the semester-long assignment [wish I knew what was distracting me in those days!] until the day before it was due.)

(I received 110pts. [out of 100] for my "extensive research".)

(I've felt guilty ever since.)

Snap! (Except for the guilt bit.)

I also once received 85% for a paper on Milton's Comus, and not only had I never read it, I only ever mentioned it in the title. The rest was bullshit.

Anon, if this is still an issue, and you get busted, act like you're just doing what you think professional academics do, that is, write essays that are 95% other people's thoughts (Derrida, Foucault, Bourdieu, et al.), and just a little bit yours.

I'm glad this question is still being answered. It is, after all, the most important question on the server. (What is a server? AGAIN I use a word I don't understand.)

Okay, so, you've had the advice, now make with the rest of the story. What did you do?

I had a meeting with my lecturer and he seemed so bored when I actually spoke that it was fine. He talked a lot himself and I said that all his ideas were great, and they were pretty good, and I ended up feeling thoroughly pissed off with the whole idea of academic 'dialogue' and hopefully he ended up feeling good.