That happened to me before. What I did is I talked to the teacher about it and said for the next paper you assign me I will research it in front of you and write it in front of you and if the paper I am writing now has the same tone and writing style as my last paper you will grade me the grade I am deserved on the last paper. It worked. She went to talk to the teacher I had last year; he mentioned to her that he put me into honors English without me having to take the exam to get in. So it worked for me. You can give it a try.

Go to the dean or the principal... The teacher has to have proof u plagiarized. They can't just fail you because the suspect you did. The onus is on the teacher to prove it.

This is Likely real. In my experience middle school and high school English teachers are very quick to jump the gun. Especially if they think you’re a dolt. When I was a junior, my honors English teacher accused me of plagiarizing a word from another text. I still have no idea how that works. My senior year, our AP English teacher accused a student of plagiarizing a 19th century Japanese haiku. The students work was written in English but the other was, of course, written in Japanese (which she apparently spoke, but the student did not). We wondered how the hell a 17 year old in Ohio would learn enough Japanese to find, let alone read and plagiarize this Japanese haiku.

This happened to me as well. I got my older sister who had just done some university english courses for journalism to help me format my paper correctly. The teacher through I had copied and pasted it all because it was not like my past paper. Apparently trying to improve equals cheating, strange I thought the point of school was to learn and get better.

suit it to turnitin.com. they check for that stuff. then shove it back in his face

YDI for being a super genius. lol.

That happened to me once too about a fictional short story I wrote, except my teacher was smart and looked all over the internet and everywhere to try and find it but she couldn't. Then she confronted me about my thought process and when she could clearly see how I came up with my ideas, she just congratulated me and told me to write a novel.

My Junior English teacher told me that I couldn't possibly have written a paper so well. She couldn't take away points as she had no proof, but it was still crappy. (I still got a 100!) At the end of my senior year, the same teacher made awards for some of us. Mine was "Most likely to write a best selling novel." I'm working on my first book.

that's just wrong

Man, that's one bad teacher!