Diligent but unlucky?

For the past year or two I've been periodically hearing an odd sort of excuse from students who have done poorly on papers: "Oops, I sent you the wrong version of my paper!" While I can sympathize with a student who revises a draft and then sends the earlier unrevised version, I hear this excuse most often from students suspected of plagiarism or whose papers clearly do not fulfill the requirements of the assignment. What they're really saying is, "I wrote two versions of my paper, one plagiarized and one original, but oops, I sent you the wrong one!" Or "You know, I wrote a whole different version of this paper that actually did follow the guidelines for the assignment, but silly me, I sent you the one that didn't!"

Are students these days really writing multiple versions of all their papers? What diligent students! I've revised hundreds of drafts, but once the final version is done, the draft goes into the trash. And suppose a student wrote a paper full of plagiarized passages and then revised it to "fix" the plagiarism; wouldn't he want to delete the plagiarized version just to destroy the incriminating evidence? But no: these students carefully store the plagiarized versions and then send them to me purely by accident. What unfortunate students! To think that a minor and completely understandable error in clicking on a file name should result in a Very Bad Grade!

Such diligent but unlucky students deserve my compassion, don't they? I ought to give them the benefit of the doubt. "All right," I'll say, "since you've worked so hard to write two different versions of your paper and since the 'right' version is sitting right there in your document file, go ahead and send it to me. You've got sixty seconds...starting now."