Francine's Pilfered Paper

Francine's Pilfered Paper is the first half of the 8th episode of Season 11. It first aired on September 5, 2007 with "Buster Gets Real".

Summary
For her Thanksgiving essay, Francine finds a website with all the information she needs. She copies and prints it as her own work, not knowing about the concept of plagiarism, or its consequences, which may get her suspended.

Plot
Mr. Ratburn asks the class to write a topic based on Thanksgiving. Francine feels that she will not be able to handle the topic (What the Pilgrims ate). Brain shows her that she could look up information on the internet and gave a warning that that not all the stuff she might find is accurate.

She goes home and finds a website that she feels suits her topic. She copies the information and created a title "Food For Thought". The next day she hands in the assignment early and surprises her classmates. Mr. Ratburn complemented on the neatness and timing of the assignment. Buster checks Francine to make sure she is not a robot.

The next day, while everyone was working on their assignment, Francine was watching the football game on TV. She gets called in by her sister Catherine, who tells her that she found a website that might help her with her assignment. Francine was surprised and tells her that this is her assignment. Catherine is surprised, and tells her that she can't use someone else's work as her own, and explains that doing so is plagiarism. At dinner, Oliver Frensky, Francine's father, talks about stealing. This causes Francine to feel guilty about her assignment. She asks to be excused from the dinner table, and then rides her bike to Mr. Ratburn's house.

Mr. Ratburn meets Francine at the door. He assumes she has come over to get her assignment. He walks over to his desk and grabs a marker and marked Francine's project with A minus. He says that there was some missing information. That night she has a dream that she is an adult and the writer of the website visited her and said that Francine is a fake.

On Monday morning she gets to class early, tells Mr. Ratburn about her accidental plagiarism and gives him a different report. In class, Mr. Ratburn was handing back the Thanksgiving assignment. He comes to Francine and says to her how original her real report was. Francine looks at the assignment and sees that she earned a B plus. Arthur asks her what was so exciting for her that she earned a B plus. She replies that it's because she turned in a paper that happens to be original, and the episode ends.

Trivia

 * WooHoo! is a parody of Yahoo!.
 * In the prologue, Francine's has a red letter 'P' on the front of her cap. This a reference to The Scarlet Letter, with the 'P' presumably standing for 'plagiarist/plagiary'.
 * During the prologue, which takes place before the first Thanksgiving, Francine is the only one who doesn't speak like a pilgrim.

Goofs

 * Mr. Morris appears even though he left the show in the episode April 9th.
 * When Francine is watching TV she is wearing socks. Then, when she goes into her's and Catherine's room she is wearing shoes.
 * When Francine takes the work off the website, she copies, cuts, and pastes. However, you can't cut information from the Internet. You can only copy it.
 * In this episode, Francine doesn't know what plagiarism is, but back in Binky Barnes, Art Expert, she was the one that pointed out that Arthur and Buster copied their report from the book.

Home Video
DVD:
 * Dancing Fools (DVD)
 * Arthur: Season 11