It is essay writing season at my school, and I find myself swamped with assignments. In the draft-version of one of my papers, I have copied one paragraph from a paper I wrote recently for a different course. It occured to me that is is questionable from an academic honesty point of view, but ultimately seems fair game.
Then I noticed the following statement in my schools official plagiarism policy:
**2.1.1 **Cheating is the attempt to gain an improper advantage in an academic evaluation. Forms of cheating include:
HUH? How is using my own intellectual property ‘cheating’? Presumably there is a legitimate way to go about doing this, via citing onself. But even that seems unnecessary. What might the point of this type of rule be? Is it really fair?
Bah, I’m sure someone’s going to nail me for this, but I re-used an entire paper once, changing just a few key words and modifying the intro and conclusion just slightly. The body itself was damn near identical. Despite this, the teacher considered it one of the “best papers [she had] ever seen.”
I don’t feel the least bit guilty about it. I took the course simply for the credit, education was seconday, particulary since I already knew most of the material.
**Note: ** I’m not advocating that you do the same; it’s up to you. I’m merely offering my perspective on something similar that I did. If you find it goes against your ethics, or you’re afraid you may be caught, by all means, don’t re-use it.
Is your professor using turnitin.com? If so you’d better tell him or her ahead of time what you want to do.
I actually think you should talk to your professor about it in any case, anyway.
In my department, we do consider it plagiarism even if the work plagiarized is your own. (I personally don’t understand this. I can even find examples of published authors who have lifted material from one of their works and use it in other works, and no one calls it plagiarism. Rather, its a case of their work developing through more than one paper, or something to that effect.)
Somehow, in my undergrad work, I found out in my Jr or Sr year about the plagiarism policy against turning in your own work for different classes, but with
the escape clause that instructor permission could be granted. I had no problem getting my Profs’ OK- and that also applied to grad school.
I think it would be pretty fucked up for someone to claim I was “plagiarizing” myself. A person’s creation is sacred, and the whole point of aggressively discouraging plagiarism is to protect that sanctity.
But what you’ve created is yours. Period. And commas, too.
At the educational institution where I work, we also consider it academic dishonesty to re-use your own work. In fact, we have a cover sheet that goes on every assignment, that the student has to sign, that states, “I certify that this assignment is my own work in which my sources are acknowledged and which I submit for the first time.”
I’m not sure if it is considered plagiarism, as such, but the way I explain it to my students is: “You may have written something similar to this before, but you didn’t write it with the knowledge that you now have, or from the perspective you are now being asked to consider, and it will show. By all means, use your previous work - but revise it to reflect your new knowledge, and reword it to fit in better with what you’re doing now.”
Then again, in our 3-year degree program there aren’t many classes where one would end up reusing their previous work. Maybe this could be more defensible if students could take multiple courses asking for the same assessment items?
At my college this was called ‘dual submission’. It was allowed, but only with the permission of the professor to whom you were re-submitting it. I never did it (mainly for reason b below), but as I understood permission was very unlikely to be given since:
a. The purpose of doing the research paper was to show that you’ve understood what you learned from the lectures, readings and group discussions well enough to build on it by producing something original. Simply handing in a paper that had been written beforehand for a different course would defeat that purpose completely. And while claiming ‘but I didn’t learn anything from this course’ probably wouldn’t get the desired reaction, I’m sure someone has tried it at some point.
b. Each course had pretty well-defined scope and purpose, so it was unlikely that a well-written research paper would be directly relevant enough to two different courses to merit a good grade in both.
I think the only circumstances in which it might be granted would be if a student had changed majors and through some odd chance was required to take a low-level course that covered material the student had already passed at a higher level (even then the student could probably have successfully petitioned to skip the course), and the student was in some personal difficulty (multiple deaths in the family, for example) that was making it impossible to keep up with the course load. Otherwise, I think most professors were of the opinion that if you sign up for the course, you do all the work.
Just this last semester I recycled the same test answer for the same question, which was posed in both the first midterm and the final. I’d gotten a perfect score the first time, so my reasoning was, if the answer had been deemed flawless the first time why should I change it? Still, I was worried about being accused of self-plagiarism, but I never was, and the final grade was as good as I’d hoped for.
I would not consider reusing your own work “cheating” at all.
You’re not stealing from anyone. You’re not making yourself look capable of work that you can’t actually do. Those are the two reasons that plagiarism is wrong, in my opinion.
I think the worst you can say is that it’s lazy…but laziness isn’t a crime.
I think the point is being missed here. Resubmitting the same work is an attempt to gain double-credit - ie. you already have received credit for that work so therefore you shouldn’t receive it again.
You can’t plagiarise yourself - but in order to avoid the double-credit issue you should reference anything you have already written. As somebody above says, if your institution uses turnitin or similar, you will get caught doing this.
It is actually considered self-plagiarism/double dipping and it is a problem, particularly if you don’t discuss it with both your professors (the one for whom you originally wrote the paper and the one to whom you now want to turn it in) and get permission from both of them.
It’s not that you’re stealing from yourself - sure, I can’t steal the money that’s mine and sitting on my table - but the dishonesty factor and the intention of deception. From here (sorry, there aren’t any anchors for me to give a link straight to the desired portion)
If you’re an undergrad, the rules about copying yourself aren’t as stringent as in graduate school, and for a reason. Grad students are expected to add to the body of knowledge while they learn – that’s one of the incentives universities have for having graduate schools. Occasionally, a graduate student comes up with something truly new, and that university gets to share the glory. For that reason, graduate students absolutely must cite all previously “published” materials, to help the rest of the academic world sort out what’s new and original, and what isn’t.
So, if you are a graduate student, you absolutely must alert your professor of your intent and you absolutely must cite yourself according to the bibliographical or “Works Cited” format assigned to your project. If you’re an undergrad – just talk with the prof before you hand in your paper.
If a person is able to appropriately and successfully submit the same work for two different classes, the problem lies with the class materials and expectations, not with the student. I’m sure we’ve all been forced to take classes from which we benefitted very little due to prerequisites or what-have-you. If the class is covering material I have already learned, why should I have to demonstrate the same knowledge in a separate effort, just because there’s someone else at the front of the room?
You should, but you should also reference it appropriately, because it is no longer original (for one thing).
Bear in mind that the UK system is different however, and we tend to design structured (often linear) courses so the issue of selection, prerequisites, etc. doesn’t come up so often. In my university I would be appalled if a student could submit an entire essay for two separate classes. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if they could add to an extant piece of work with supplementary information and insight.
It’s been 20 years, so I guess I can admit I turned in basically the same paper for 3 different classes. There was some re-write each time, because this was pre-word processors, but there wasn’t any additional research involved. It was originally written for an Anthropology class, modified for Social Psychology, and given a final re-write for my upper-division writing requirement (where we were supposed to re-write a previous paper.)
AFAIK, there weren’t any rules against it at that time. Now, of course, things are different.
You have been assigned to write a paper for that class. You have not been assigned to reuse a paper you wrote for another class. Do you understand the difference?
Maybe I am just too crabby today, but this strikes me as a really condescending response. Nobody here is questioning the difference between the two.
My argument here boils down to questioning the purpose of any assignment, and by extension the “plagiarism” rule cited by the OP. Is an assignment given so that the student can demonstrate knowledge of the topic? Or is it to demonstrate strict obedience to the person assigning the work? I think it’s the former. Hence, I have no objections to someone re-using previous work as long as it meets the terms of the assignment.
More detail for anyone not already completely bored with my post:
Let’s take an example from my student days. I was required to take an English composition class as a freshman. I was also taking an engrossing Philosophy course. For the Philosophy course, I wrote a paper arguing a specific position and using a specific format (intro, thesis statement, paragraphs supporting thesis statement, conclusion). Some weeks later, my English class finally ground its way into persuasive writing, using the same specific format. Topic was whatever we wanted – all we had to do was take a position and argue it using the exact format I’d used in my Philosophy paper. Guess what I turned in.
Looking back, I still have no remorse whatsoever for using the same paper. The English professor wanted me to demonstrate that I knew how to do this type of writing, and I demonstrated it. The Philopsphy professor wanted me to demonstrate my understanding of two philosophers’ conflicting points of view and to argue persuasively for the one I found more convicing, and I did that. Everybody got what they needed.
In the real world, when you are faced with a problem that you have faced before and you save time by solving it the same way, it’s called increased productivity and you are typically rewarded.
But the academy is not like the real world–it’s like the gym. You can’t say today that I lifted that very weight yesterday, so problem solved. The point is to do the work over and over. Pedagogically sound? I don’t think so. But if you want the degree, remember that the point of the paper is not to actually demonstrate you have the knowledge, but to demonstrate that you lifted that weight again today, for its own sake.
During my last semester of High School I was given the following assignment in my English Comp course (paraphrased, from memory):
Cool. It was 1977, and President Carter had just signed a treaty with the leader of Panama that would give eventual control over the Panama Canal Zone to Panama. It was a highly contentious issue, and therefore a subject that fit the assignment to a T. I wrote a pretty good paper and got an A- on it.
Flash forward just a few months to my first semester at college, where I was given the following assignment in my English Comp course:
:eek: I just did that! Hell yes I re-typed that same paper, made corrections where I had been marked off the first time, and turned it in. Now, I only got a B on it at the college level, and perhaps I might’ve done better with a whole new paper, but I was satisfied with the B and it was worth the trade-off to me, to be able to focus more on my other courses that were directly related to my major (accounting). Like Beadalin, I have no remorse for having done so, as I demonstrated to both instructors that I understood the course material, even if one felt I did a slightly better job of it than the other.
