Evan, my roommate and I share a computer. The other day, I looked on the desktop and saw a paper that he wrote that was almost completely made up of stuff from the first draft of my senior thesis paper. He turned it in through one of those plagiarism checkers too. My thesis is due in a week, and he says he’ll report me for plagiarism if I even think about telling on him. What do I do?

Start hiding your stuff in the cloud, man. There’s a whole encrypted Internet out there for you, and the NSA isn’t going to plagiarize your thesis for your capstone project, hopefully.

As for right now, your roommate might have the upper hand in that your work has been put through the web as original with his name on it. If you turn it in without doing anything, it’s very possible that it could show up as plagiarism, and you don’t want that.

His “reporting you” threat is totally bogus, though. What your roommate doesn’t realize is that that computer files have extra info that shows when files were last modified. The first thing you need to do is stick a flash drive in the computer and find your first draft, but don’t open it. Don’t touch it at all. Just drag and drop it onto the flash drive and delete it from the computer.

When your roommate “reports” you for plagiarism, just show the file on the flash drive to any inquiring parties. Since no one has touched it since it was plagiarized, the file data should show a “last modified” date from before your roommate’s paper’s due date. It might even match the date on your roommate’s paper’s file data.

Now that you have some proof that you were plagiarized, just stroll on over to the office of academic affairs, calmly explain the situation and leave that flash drive with them.

Once you’ve got that flash drive, you are welcome to counter-blackmail your roommate. If you’re not feeling so vengeful, you can just let him know about your pocketed metadata. Of course, you’re still free to copy the file back onto your computer and get your thesis done at your leisure.

ealinko@mavs.coloradomesa.edu