This English teacher gave me a really hard time... I had to write a political essay about the success and failures of the current president. I read some articles about the government, president Bush etc. I found one article that I really liked and I agreed with the author's points - it basically was written in a form of an essay. I thought - since I agree with the topic sentence and the author's points, I will paraphrase it so that I get an original essay.

I rewrote EACH AND EVERY sentence, for example:
Original: President Bush should have not been reelected.I changed it to:
I don't think it was good for the nation to elect Mr. Bush to be the US president again.I left the original author's ideas, but I completely reworded them. Unfortunately, my teacher had read this article before and somehow determined I plagiarized it and gave me an F!
I don't think it was fair of him... He didn't require us to include a reference page so I didn't write where I got the ideas from.
He was the hardest teacher I had to deal with throughout college... :( I still think I didn't plagiarize it.
Joy