Um, it’s your shop, your chocolate bar, your cage and your key. You can’t steal it. You can take it, eat it, sell it, give it away, let it melt or leave it to rot but you can’t steal it.
In real life, if I were asked by two senior managers for an analysis on a particular set of data, each would get a copy of the same analysis - regardless of whether they were in different divisions of the company. The only reason one would get something different would be if their request was different enough that the original analysis would not cover it. Even then, they would get the same thing except for the piece covering the variation in the request, not a completely different analysis.
Anything different, at any level, is busy work that has everything to do with arbitrary rules and nothing to do with ethics.
I disagree, and as above if academics get in the habit of presenting an older work as a newly created work it is a real problem. Different industries have different ethical requirements, and in academics presenting the chain of work is an important ethical component, even if it is your own work. I’m not going to try to convince anybody of that any more than I already have. So if you don’t agree that’s ok. YMMV.
This is an interesting discussion. I have a day job at a corporation, and I’m an adjunct instructor at a university. I never really gave it a lot of thought, and with the classes/topics I teach, I doubt it would ever come up.
If a student ever had asked me to turn in a previously submitted assignment, though, I probably would have said, “Sure” without thinking much about it. I’d approach it like I do in my day job, pretty much what Doctor Jackson says. I’m in the IT field. My classes are very focused on direct job skills. “Here is what you will need to know/do to succeed in this kind of job.” We’re not doing original research or analysis. If someone already has a skill I’m trying to teach them, I guess I don’t much care that they’re not doing new work to re-acquire the skill.
However, reading this thread is making me rethink it a bit, and I do see that the expectations are different in an academic setting than in a corporate one. At the very least, i’ll need to see what my university says about it.
Unethical unless cleared by the prof. I’ve let students build upon and expand a short paper submitted for another course, but only after establishing the guidelines.
We use a plagiarism detection program that identifies same/similar paper submissions. Matches to other student’s work is anonymous, so there’s a risk of being reported for academic dishonesty if one can’t prove it was self-plagiarism.
You have your opinion and I respect it. But an education is not just about whether you learned fact X. Papers and other exercises are not necessarily assigned to make sure you read THIS reference and learned THAT fact. I was trying to make the point in my analogy that a training program often repeats exercises (academic or physical) for a purpose. The more you do research and the more you write, the better you get (with proper feedback).
During college and graduate programs, I’ve written several papers on nearly identical topics. I’d like to think that each one was better than the previous. I didn’t write about sexual dimorphism in M. fuscata once and then say, “OK. Got it all covered. No need to think about that again.”
Your writing the same paper for the final as for mid-term should be possible in a condition of your education being accumulative only if you have not learned or developed at in the interim. In which case you should fail the second half of the class.
Yes it is foolish to repeat the same work. You should be doing something new.
Students are expected to turn in original work, a copy of what you have already produced is a copy of your past work, not something original.
What a reasoned response.
Not sure what is unclear to you or hard for you to comprehend.
An artist (musical, visual, performance, whatever) is commissioned to produce an original work for an event and for it submits a work they produced for a different patron who also paid them for their original work.
Would the party that commissioned the current work be okay with that? Should they be? What, if anything, is wrong with them submitting their own work as “original”? They created it, it is original, right?
Of course the analogy is not exact but the way in which it differs is important.
A teacher’s goal is not to check off that X fact has been learned or Y skill has been achieved (before the student ever took the class). Oh, it may include verifying that some minimal standard is present, but to a greater extent it is to take where ever the student is at the start of the class and bring them to a higher level of skill and of understanding. Such ideally is the student’s goal as well. Submitting a copy of your past work as original to this class is clearly subverting that (ideally shared) intent. (Using the past work to go well beyond it OTOH would be fine.)
Hell, even in the mindset that a teacher is merely checking off that some skill or factual knowledge is present the obligation is to verify that it is currently there. I have previously placed umbilical catheters and somewhere I have a record verifying that I achieved proficiency at that skill … oh nearly 30 years ago. If I wanted to have hospital privileges to do that procedure now my past documentation would not be enough; I’d need to somehow demonstrate that my skills are current. (They are not.)
You were once able to write a cogent essay that happened to meet the criteria of this assignment? That’s nice. As your teacher I don’t care. I need to verify that you can do it now. And if I am good at my job I will make the assignment such that you have to grow some by way of completing it.
As a general rule teachers expect original work like a patron who commissions a piece expects original work. Not a copy of something you have produced before. And it would be idiotic for any student to imagine that turning in a copy of past work in any way furthers their skill or knowledge development.
I thought such a rationale had already been given, by several posters.
Why, or whether, it should be forbidden depends on the purpose of the assignment.
And in most educational contexts, the purpose of an assignment has more to do with the process by which you produce the finished product than it does with the finished product itself.