So I’m in an online college course and I got a weird, vague email from the professor a few days ago claiming that I plagiarized. She threatened to report me to the dean of academics at my university (I’m taking the online class through the school I attend full-time). When I asked her what she was talking about she told me that I had uploaded another student’s assignment with her name on it.
That was true, but it was an honest mistake on my part. The reason I even had another student’s assignment on my hard drive was because we were supposed to upload our assignments to a forum, and the submission instructions included the sentence “Post your assignment here so everyone can view your ideas”. The assignment was confusing, so I downloaded a PDF another girl in my class had already posted. Looking at her assignment helped me get started, and after I finished my assignment and exported it as a PDF I went to upload it to the forum. The girl’s PDF had a similar name to mine so I accidentally uploaded hers instead of mine and here’s where the shit show begins.
I sent an email to the professor apologizing and explaining that it was an honest mistake. I sent her my PDF that I had intended to turn in, provided a screenshot of the file’s metadata showing that it had last been modified before the assignment’s deadline, and even told her how to view the metadata for herself if she didn’t believe me. Then she sent me another email telling me I’d still receive a zero on the assignment because I “crossed a line” by downloading another student’s assignment and “using it as a model” for my own. Pissed, I emailed her back telling her (politely) that the submission directions literally told us to do exactly what she just described, and I quoted the exact sentence that encouraged us to do that verbatim. I sent the email and began texting a friend to tell them what happened, but when I looked back at the submission page for that specific assignment, the sentence I’d quoted was removed from the page completely. This was not even 10 minutes after I sent the email.
Anyway, I’m guessing she deleted the sentence so that she could deny the fact that it was ever included in the directions. I’m hoping I can somehow roll the site back at least a few hours so I can prove that she deleted it (rolling it back to yesterday or something would work too). I already checked, and the site was never archived on Wayback Machine. The forum in question is on my school’s Moodle page, if that helps
TL;DR professor accused me of plagiarism, I called bullshit, emailed her and quoted a sentence that was very important to my case from the course’s website, she deleted it within a few minutes after I sent the email. Need to know if there’s a way to look at previous versions of the site (other than Wayback Machine) or a recent archive of some sort
UPDATE: Thankfully the professor told me that she deleted the sentence to prevent further confusion and assured me that she wasn’t trying to hide something. Thanks for the help yall.
IF YOU WANT A MUCH LONGER, FULL VERSION OF THE STORY… check my profile! I explained it all in much more detail on r/TIFU
