I think most of those posting are overlooking this critical piece of the OP. There is a big difference in re-submitting a paper done previously and lifting a paragraph from one paper to use in another.
I personally see absolutely nothing wrong with this. If you feel a little squeamish about it, you could always lead in with a statement like, "I have stated in a previous work that…[insert paragraph here].
but I used The Old Man and the Sea for all of my book reports from 8th grade on. 
These kids today have no idea what it was like, do they? 
I dunno about recycling entire papers, and my ethics have been questioned before, but I always thought there was some skill involved in selecting topics for research papers that would lend themselves to being adapted for reuse in future classes. I seem to recall riding the War Powers Act, Sino/Soviet/US relations, and nuclear power hard back in the late 70s- early 80s.
Well you’ve certainly framed the argument in your favor. Congratulations, if we accepted that the only two choices are a demonstration of knowledge or strict obedience then I guess I’ll concede. However, I think the purpose of assigning essays is to not only demonstrate knowledge of the subject but to improve organizational skills and show that you can follow directions. If this is the case, then I think your argument falls apart.
Nor should you, in my opinion, because I don’t think you didn’t anything unethical. However, I think a policy that forbids people from submitting the same paper in different years or subjects is a reasonable policy.
Marc
wow, i almost forgot about this thread, its nice to see it developed quite nicely.
I particularly enjoyed reading Flipshod’s point of view as well as Martijus.
The paragraph I considered copying was an explanation of a very technical topic covered in two ‘overlapping’ courses (both courses have the exact same title, one is a lower level and one a higher level).
I will chat with my profs about the issue soon.
The easy way around this if your honor code policy is vague…is to ask the prof/teacher for whom you are submitting the paper.
Proper citation and quoting (even the amount of quotation of a particular piece) is an extremely big issue in my profession. In school I would sometimes come up with a turn of phrase independently, research the bloody topic and there it would be…sitting in some freaking judge’s opinion, or analysis very similar to it. I always always always showed the prof my work, explained the situation, showed them the opinion and asked about citation, even when I’d come up with an idea or a phrase by myself. Sometimes they would say “that’s a common enough phrase/usage/analysis in this area, don’t worry about it” other times they’d tell me to cite it. But I never got in trouble, because I’d always ask. I found it highly disturbing that so many of my classmates got honor code violations because the ethical bar wasn’t THAT high. I mean, all you need to do to avoid it is ask.
So why fight with someone over the internet over whether it’s morally right or wrong? All that really matters is what your professor and the administration says.
You will have to excuse students for their confusion, given the tremendous number of college textbooks reissued every two to three years, in ever-more-expensive editions, with little to no changes. Quite often the textbooks are penned by college professors. While they obviously credit work done in earlier editions, these same authors certainly do cash in despite having done precious little additional work. 
I had the same teacher for English 1 and 2 last year…he assigned every paper the same in both classes. I rewrote the first one, and after that I just printed new copies off my hard drive, with the corrections made. He never said anything.
What’s the story about situations where you use one paper as a starting point for others?
Here’s the example:
Freshman year of college: Write paper describing data compression algorithms, specificially LZW & Huffman coding.
Junior year of college(technical writing class): Assigned to write research paper on topic within your own field of study. Dig up old paper, rewrite most of it, add sections for applications, variants, etc… Also add much better bibliography, and rewrote paragraphs where I understood things better than I did.
5th year: Assigned large research paper in CS seminar class. Dust off old Tech writing paper, add new 1/3 of paper about video, sound and image compression methods, and further refine.
I got A’s on all three versions, but it originally started off as a 6 page essay in an honors programming class.
If I’d turned the same exact paper in 3 times, then it might be self-plagiarism, but I think the way I did it should be fine.
I’ve done it. In high school we were asssigned a term paper both in biology and AP English, and the teachers agreed we could turn in the same paper for both classes.
In college, I had done some work for one class, then turned in the same paper for another class. It was on the same subject, I had done the work, and it was relevant. I don’t see how it’s cheating. I wasn’t trying to pass off someone else’s work as mine.
As someone mentioned upthread, in business, it would be called optimizing productivity. But business is about getting the end results. Even this isn’t 100% true. I’ve heard of clients, justifiably, getting POed when they found out that they paid someone full value for work, and then that person just dusted off an old report and change a few words. To the client, less work should equal less cost.
School is about learning the process as much as it is about regurgitating the facts. A paper isn’t just a way to fill up 6 pages with ink. It’s about learning how to gather and select information, organize work and thoughts and write the paper itself. That’s why you get graded on spelling, punctuation, and presentation, not just on the facts presented.
If the reused paper earns a respectable grade, clearly the lessons have been learned.
And honestly, the education is secondary to my first objective, which is to get credit for the course. It just so happens learning something new is sometimes a side effect of this goal.
The experience of writing the essay is meant to be a learning experience, to improve your skills at research, developing good ideas, and organizing them well. With every essay, your skills grow. At least, that’s the theory.
If you only write the essay once, you only have that experience once… so why should you get credit twice?
Essays are assigned to teach you how to research, not because the instructor really needs some reading about X.
As I stated above, if the essay scores a respectable grade, then one clearly already possesses the skills the teacher wishes to see reflected in the writing.
I guess my outlook is just different from your’s. I attend college for the credit, with the education being an occasional side-effect.
I don’t think essays are meant to be a single demonstration of ability, as much as actually putting those abilities into practice. Your coursework is supposed to represent a certain amount of effort and practice, as well as knowledge gained.
FWIW, the only time I ever double submitted something was in high school when we had to write essays in English class on any topic–I’d often resubmit something from history class. I got away with it, because the English essay assignments were really targeted at the students who were mostly taking shop and gym and didn’t know how to string 2 sentences together and didn’t have any other classes with essay assignments, while students who were in academic/honours classes were already writing half a dozen essays a year.
:eek:
My AP sophomores write at least 2 multi-page researched essays a week. And that’s in History.