Isn’t that how it works for most people?
That is exactly why most colleges specifically say you should not do this. It is because the “obvious right” answer to the professors and to many students are not the same. So we have a policy which says you may not do this, or you may do this only under the following conditions.
Perhaps viewing education as some kind of adversarial game like this is something that an immature high school student might do.
But unless you have the bizarre idea that just “getting grades” is what the educational process is about, why would you suggest that evading coursework by self-plagiarizing is appropriate?
The two are not mutually exclusive. Some may do the action necessary for the grade and learn something despite their best efforts not to.
True, sometimes some students do not learn anything through the process of researching a paper and having to formulate what they have found out into a meaningful exposition clearly communicated to a particular set of expectations. I think actually usually they do both further develop the skill and gain some additional knowledge through the exercise, but with enough sustained effort and hard work some might be able to avoid learning anything.
But most will, and will learn a bit more each time they do the process, even if they only are doing the action for the grade, and that skill development and additional knowledge gained cannot possibly occur just by recycling a previously written paper.
Now what would be kosher in my mind would be to use the previous paper as a jumping off point for another one. So in the context of the op’s example, applying the knowledge you now have of a particular scientist’s life story to formulate a particular perspective at explaining and understanding the context of particular aspects of his/her scientific work, or going into one period of the scientist’s life that seemed most interesting in much greater detail. That paper might be particularly strong by virtue of the knowledge already gained, but it would require its own research and be a novel work. And it would still be a good idea to both run it by the teacher first and to be careful not to lift any sentences fully from your past work.
I don’t think you’re naive. And I agree that the purpose of education should be learning, not getting a good grade. I will only suggest that the question is…complicated.
Here are three anecdotes (all true!) from my own college days. I’d be curious to know what you would say about each of them.
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I was assigned to read Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions in not one, not two, but *three *undergraduate courses. (Once was plenty.) I don’t recall if we had to write papers, present projects, etc., on the book each time, or if it was just a book for discussion, but in any case I treated the second and third times as something of a “paid vacation.” Oh boy! Read it, don’t need to read it again. Now, would you argue that the professors of the second and third courses should have assigned me a different book to read? Would you argue that it was incumbent on me to alert the professors and explain the situation and request a different book?
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For a language course sophomore year I read a German epic poem from the medieval era. I probably wrote a paper on it, don’t recall for sure. Undergraduate years were a long time ago. The following year I took a history course. One of the papers assigned had to do with the medieval period–might have been something about the relationship between individual and society, I don’t recall exactly; anyway, it was kind of open-ended and we were encouraged to go beyond the course assigned readings. So I wrote my paper on the epic I’d read the previous year. (And got a fine grade.) The paper was by necessity very different from whatever I’d written the previous year, since the focus of the paper would have been very different; but I had already read the book. Would you say I should have written the paper on a different topic? Does it matter that some students did not go beyond the assigned readings when they wrote their own papers? Is this the sort of thing that the professor should care about, or is this just a matter of me short-changing myself?
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I took a 100-level logic course in the philosophy department early in my college career. There was some philosophy, but it was mostly symbolic/mathematical logic, presented at a fairly slow pace. Later I took a 300-level seminar in the math department. Three weeks of the class were devoted to the mathematical logic I’d already learned. The professor said to those of us who had been in that class, “Don;t bother showing up during that time, here’s an independent study for you to work on instead.” If the professor hadn’t been aware that several of us had taken the earlier course, would it have been necessary for us to inform him? If he had decided he didn’t have the time to put together an independent study for us, what should have been our next step?
I never did have an occasion in either college or grad school where I had essentially the same assigned paper in two courses, but it’s not difficult to imagine a scenario in which that could happen. “What was the effect of the Abolition movement on the eradication of American slavery?,” for example, could be an assigned paper topic for a history class on the causes of the Civil War, a course on social movements in the sociology department, and an African American Studies course in US slavery. If I’ve already written an A paper for one of these courses, and have become very familiar with the sources, the context, and the controversies, it’s hard to see what I’m learning by doing another paper from scratch. I guess you’d say I should ask to write on a different topic; I wish I could say that all professors I’ve known would be open to that.
None of this is meant to be a gotcha. As I said, I do believe that the goal of education is developing skills, abilities, and attitudes, not getting A’s, and handing in the same paper, as you observe, works against that. I guess I’d just say that a lot of what happens in colleges and grad programs works against that, and no one seems to bat an eye.
Handing a previously written (and submitted) paper in to a second class should not be prohibited. It may or may not meet the requirements of the current class, and if it doesn’t, it will be graded accordingly. That’s the chance the student takes.
But I don’t see it as unethical, and nothing I’ve read in this thread has, in my opinion, made a solid case for why it would be.
mmm
Easy to apply what I set up as a standard -
“Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions in not one, not two, but three undergraduate courses” - Hopefully each time you engaged in discussions about the material you were able to do so informed by your previous experience with it and were entering discussions a more critical participant. If you had papers to write about it then turning in the same paper each time would be wrong; writing about different aspects or perspectives informed by what you had learned in a previous class would not only be fair but would be desirable. It would be applying previous knowledge and skills in a different context.
Likewise applying a German epic poem from the medieval era read in a previous class as resource material in another class discussing the relationship between individual and society in the medieval period. Applying knowledge learned elsewhere in a different manner in a subject with a different focus is what a liberal arts education hopes to get us to be able to do, not learning classes as isolated silos.
The 300-level seminar in the math department that covered some of what you had already covered in another class? No need to to tell the professor. But not much relevance to claiming that you were doing new work that you were not in fact doing.
It’s not allowed where my son goes to school. It’s considered to be plagiarism.
It’s perfectly ethical to use the same research. It is your research, after all.
I think “self-plagiarism” is some kind of oxymoron. “Plagiarism” is presenting someone else’s work as your own. “Self-plagiarism” is presenting…your own work as your own. Huh?
You would probably want a somewhat different slant on the two papers. You’d have a different theme, etc.
If the same paper works for both a science class and an English class, I would almost think it was a failure of either one class or the other. The English paper would be demonstrating different things (how to format a paper, how to cite sources, how to expand on a theme) while the science paper would–well, I don’t know. I’m thinking the focus would be a little more science-y. Hypothesis, experiment, conclusion.
Now, it may be unacceptable to the teacher. If prohibited, then it’s unethical to try to sneak it past. It may be that the school will scan all papers and any repetition of any previous paper, even if it was your paper, is not acceptable.
But if it’s yours, it’s not plagiarism.
I went to graduate school with some of the same people who went to my undergraduate school. One day early in the semester one of them came up to me and said, “Watch out, they grade a LOT harder in graduate school. I submitted a paper Dr. McPeek gave me an A on, and I got a D!” We had the same class but different sections and I worried all day, even though my paper was new–I liked writing papers. Plus, days or weeks after I’ve written anything, it never looks any good. It always seems like I can do better. I worried because Dr. McPeek had never once given me an A on a paper. But I was okay. I got an A on every graded thing in grad school. I don’t know if the prof in question figured out she was recycling an undergrad paper, if he talked to Dr. McPeek, if her paper was very clearly an undergrad thing in a grad-level course, or if it was just that bad and only got an A because she was Dr. McPeek’s pet.
As an undergrad, I wrote two papers simultaneously, satisfying the requirements of two separate classes, with the same general topic. I never felt like I was cheating, and never brought it up with either professor.
I learned a lot on the topic. Somebody would probably bring it up at my confirmation hearing, though. Then again, it would distract attention from my drug use.
I know someone who recycled his undergraduate thesis for his doctoral dissertation. Understand, undergrad theses are not ordinarily expected to involve an original contribution to knowledge and this was did. It was in fact quite extraordinary and well up to the level expected in a doctoral thesis. Although I don’t know for sure, I expect his doctoral supervisor knew the whole story.
As for the OP, I can see both sides and, absent a specific prohibition, I don’t think it unethical. When I taught history of math, I allowed the students to choose between writing a term paper on any relevant topic of their choosing (one wrote an original short story based on the Italian order of the lynx) or taking a mathematical final exam. I don’t think I would have objected if a student recycled a paper from a previous course.
BTW, I expected the non-math students would choose the term paper (it was for them, obviously), but in fact it was mostly the math majors who chose to do it. Just something different, I suspect. Many of the papers were very interesting.
One of the problems with self-plagiarism is when dealing with publications. Suppose I write a paper and submit it for publication and it is accepted. I then write a new paper taking large portions of the first paper without citing it and submit it. The chances that somebody saw my original paper are very low, which means a reviewer thinks everything within is new work and reviews it as such. If this is allowed there will be a glut of publications with only minor tweaks and the peer review system will collapse. So the idea of citing yourself needs to be reinforced at all levels of academics. Now, as above, where I work this behavior by students is not considered plagiarism but just academic misconduct, and that’s because plagiarism is treated very severely with a fairly significant chance of expulsion.
I didn’t and I didn’t.
Short version — I was taking two classes the same semester at Pitt way back when; one was a general writing and the other a Masters level poetry taught by the Dean of Poetry and a rather well-known poet. I used basically some of the same poems for both classes with the addition of several prose essays for the general writing class. Come the end of the semester, I learned I was getting an A+ in the poetry class and a C in the general writing class because the Professor there thought my prose was great but my poetry sucked.
Huh? Whadda u talkin about, Willis? How can the stuff that be gems in a superior Masters level and suck as a general undergraduate level? So I appealed to the Dean, he went to the other Dean, and my grade got changed to a “credit – no entry” protecting my GPA. And the Professor who panned me got sentenced to intro courses for at least the next three years. She went on to some renown as a writer in technical circles but nothing like my mentor achieved both for his work and those he taught. Not me of course, but others.
Recycling and/or refreshing earlier work was done often at Pitt in the mid-late 70s and totally accepted so I see no reason in these days of copy-and-paste from Google not to reuse good original work. After all, you wrote it and you own it.
I’m not sure whether the OP is looking for a philosophical discussion about how things should be, or more a factual answer about how things actually are in academia. I’m not up to tackling the former, but in my experience (I’m a university librarian and instruct students on ethical use of information) submitting the same paper in different courses is generally considered to be unethical.
Recycling papers is not mentioned in my university’s honor code (although it does say the examples of violations that it gives are not exhaustive), but it is explicitly forbidden by some professors in their syllabi and in some department/college level policies. I’ve always advised students to ask permission before recycling a paper. I’ve known professors who would allow a student to use an old paper as the foundation for a new paper that explored the issue in greater depth, but none who’d be fine with a student just dusting off an old paper and handing it in with little or no additional work.
It is unethical to obtain multiple grades for one and the same paper. It is ethical to keep the same topic provided one rewrites the paper completely, which is not that bad since most of the research and analysis has already been done.
In my school they are, but it is also relatively common for doctoral work to expand on the undergrad work. My own undergrad thesis was made to be used for other people’s doctoral work, it got me cited!
My graduate schools never explained the whys and wherefores of their rules, but the undergrad one always did. The probability of being able to reuse material approached zero, but we did discuss plagiarism and self-plagiarism both in the context of publications and in that of how does it affect your colleagues. If your colleagues depend on your work and it turns out you’re always copy-pasting the same material, then they’ll be slogging through the same thing… once and a half before throwing up their hands in disgust. Our work was always expected to be publication-grade, even when it wasn’t publishable due to being known material: if you’ve gotten in the habit of proper formatting, citing, etc. by the end of your first year, by the time you’re actually trying to publish it’s ingrained.
I don’t agree. Education should be useful and accumulative. If you wrote a paper about Lincoln, and are writing about Lincoln again for another class you should be bringing forward what you learned from your previous work on the topic. It is foolish to repeat the work. If a professor asks the same question on the mid-term as the final exam, you should give the same answer, not a different one.:smack:
Your personal trainer analogy makes no sense and doesn’t apply here.
If the assignment was to do deep analysis of something, then that’s the assignment, it doesn’t matter what was done before by the student.
Ridiculous. If this is such as concern, this it is the failing of the educational institution that they don’t have their educational programs well thought-out and coordinated. If the student is truly expected to be given new work, they should be giving them new assignments. The problem is, each class has a professor with tenure and they teach or not teach how they want and to hell with what everyone else is doing or if it benefits the student. It makes no logical sense to punish the student because they don’t have their act together.
This is not misconduct in any way, except on the behalf of the administration of the school for not designing a better curriculum. $40K a year for tuition, and they can’t even figure out how to design a real curriculum. Shameful.
Not it isn’t. Your work is your work. Doesn’t matter when it was done.:smack:
No, this is a failing of the institution if this is a real concern to them. The message here is that assignment are disposable and have no practical use, not even in another academic setting. It is the institution not doing their job if they are going to punish the student for doing this.
Or, I don’t know, expect academics to act with integrity?
If somebody steals a chocolate bar, but it wasn’t behind a metal cage, under lock and key do we say “That was the shopkeepers fault” or do we say “You’re not supposed to steal.”
Students are provided a course on academic honesty at the start of their program. I know with certainty that one of the subjects covered is this matter. So they’ve been told what the expectations are, it is up to them to honor them.