If there is one thing college and university professors know about their students, it’s that they don’t want to do their essays. Students will try almost any method to avoid writing their papers. Some will fake illness or claim that relatives died in order to get out of it. In fact, instructors jokingly speak of “dead grandmother syndrome” and write humorous articles about how the number one cause of death for grandparents is a student having a paper due the next day. This is a bit of a morbid joke, but it does illustrate the lengths students will go to in order to avoid writing essays. The other most common way of avoiding work is to plagiarize. Many students plagiarize their papers by copying and pasting from the internet or by recycling work that friends did in the same course in earlier semesters. But instructors always know.