I suspect that these students also have no understanding of just how serious plagiarism is. In the world outside of college, it is often treated as a misdemeanor or even worse in some cases. I think I’m going to include this information next semester and see if it helps reduce the number of incidents. I had six this past semester alone.
I gotta love this rant about a student who plagiarizes right off the bat despite all the warnings:
http://rateyourstudents.blogspot.com/2010/06/stella-from-sparksburg-sends-in-some.html
On a related note, my own college’s newspaper reports that cases of cheating and plagiarism have increased by 38% over the last few years. Some administrator opined that profs have to do a better job of telling students why the aforementioned actions are wrong and what the consequences are. Uhhh…AFAIK, all the profs whose syllabi I’ve looked at have already included the warnings therein, and most of them cover it in class as well. I don’t know what else we can do.
Love her note:
“The syllabus was chock-full of explanations, examples, and consequences. Flogging and execution weren’t included, but I think if you plagiarize I actually have the right to set your hair on fire.”
Mrs. Cad’s program now uses TurnItIn and she needs to score less than 20% for it to pass.
She had a paper rejected at 47% because she cribbed a lot of information from a paper from a previous class and it picked up on that.
Oh and your name a school affiliation on the title page (as per APAv6) is plagerism points on TII since it is a repeat of a previous work.
Those of us who actually use (among other services) Turnitin do read the originality reports, instead of just looking at the percentage, to determine what’s going on. For example, word for word quotes are “scored” as plagiarism even if they are cited correctly. No one that I know simply looks at the percentage, determines a certain percentage means fail, and moves on.
Absolutely.
Basically every university i’ve ever been affiliated with, both as a student and as a teacher, has had a rule that you can’t submit work done for one class in a second class. It’s not clear to me how much she cribbed from her previous paper, but if i thought that the bulk of one of my students’ papers consisted mainly of information from a paper they had done for another class, i’d be likely to tell them to write another paper.
I love all of these dumbass rules that put the entire burden on the student instead of requiring originality on the part of the staff. Don’t want a student to turn in the same paper twice? Don’t give them the same assignment twice. You bet your ass that if I get the same job twice in the “real world” I’m re-using the work I’ve already done before for another client.
The same thing applies to requiring attendance at lectures: if you want me to show up, give me a reason to be there. If I can pass the class without seeing you outside of exams, that’s not my fault.
Yeah, how dare faculty p[lace the burden on the students to do some actual work? Hell, we should just do their assignments for them.
I have never given the same assignment twice in a class. We’re talking about different classes here.
In some cases, it is possible for a student to do a paper for one class, and work it so that, in a completely separate class, the student does a paper on a very similar or even identical topic. This is most often a problem when the assignment has a lot of latitude, and allows the student to do a topic of his or her own choosing. In such cases, a few students do their best to simply rework a paper they’ve done for another class. I’ve never had this problem, because my assignments are generally focused enough, and specific enough, that it would be hard to do.
But there are plenty of cases where subject matter overlaps. One of my colleagues is currently teaching a seminar on the history of the Cold War. Quite a few of the students in his class have taken Cold War-related classes in other departments, like political science or international relations. If he gives them an essay assignment with considerable latitude, they might be able to simply turn in one of their papers from a previous class. But the purpose of being in his class is that they do the work required for his class.
Faculty lives under the same strictures. If a faculty member goes up for promotion from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor, and presents as part of his or her resume a just-published book, then that book will be taken into account when deciding whether or not to promote the faculty member. But, a few years later, when the faculty member wants to be promoted to full Professor, that book isn’t going to cut it, because it’s already been counted one. You’d better have a new book or series of articles to show the tenure committee.
For classes that are purely lecture-based, i sort of agree. If you want to skip lectures, and you think you can get by, that’s fine. But i don’t teach any classes that are lecture-only. The size of my classes, and the nature of my courses, mean that all of my classes combine lecturing and class discussion. And the discussion itself is not simply a means to pass an exam; it is an integral part of the process. So if i only see you at exams, you cannot pass the course, by definition, because you haven’t done the things that passing requires.
I had a professor to whom that happened as well. When you are one of a few authorities on a particular writer, I suppose this happens when a particular student isn’t aware of the professor’s CV. 
I know. And I’m saying, if there’s that much overlap between the class topics and/or assignment topics, then the student should be able to recycle as much of their own previous work as they want.
And they are. It just happens to be work that also applies in another class. Why is that a problem? As long as the work is relevant, it should be applicable.
This is a different situation completely. In this example, the point is to prove that you’ve *kept *publishing. The student’s assignment is to present a paper on the topic at hand, to demonstrate that they can do the research and have the proper grasp of the topic. It shouldn’t matter whether they first did the work now or six months ago for another class: either way, they’re capable of it.
I have no problems with requiring participation. I have problems with requiring attendance, such that someone who shows up to every class but barely opens their mouth could pass, while someone who shows up half the time but contributes well could fail.
Ah, but is the point of the paper to prove that you’ve kept learning?
We’ve had discussions on this issue (of re-submitting or re-using previous work in another class), and it seems to be somewhat controversial.
The philosophical argument for your position is that your grade in the class should be based on how much knowledge and/or skill and/or understanding you can demonstrate that you have about the topic(s) the course covers—regardless of how much of that knowledge/skill/understanding was gained during the course and how much if any you had before the semester started.
The argument against this is that, in many cases, skill or understanding is not an all-or-nothing thing. The purpose of the class is to strengthen your skills (in researching, writing, etc.) by giving you additional practice, or to deepen your understanding of the topic by exposing you to additional information or perspectives that you hadn’t been previously aware of. If you coast on what you’ve done before the semester started, the assignment is not doing what it’s supposed to be doing for you.
I think the crux of my argument is this: it’s not the fault of the student if a lot of academia, especially at lower (undergraduate) levels, consists of pointless hoop-jumping. If you can coast by on what you’ve done previously, then you should be able to do so. If you don’t want people to be able to do so, give them unique assignments. Is that harder? Yes. Tough shit.
This kind of attitude is a very good demonstration of why I stopped in disgust after I finished my B.A., and why I doubt I’ll be going back for a PhD or even a Master’s until I forget all of the things I hate about the academic world. Fat chance that will happen any time soon, I’m sure.
If you think that college consists of pointless hoop-jumping, then don’t go. When you go, however, you agree to abide by the standards set by the institution.
It may surprise you to know this, but the people who design the courses taken by undergraduates actually know a little bit about the topic. They have, in most cases, spent 4 years as undergraduates themselves (usually with a solid A average), and then anywhere from 4-8 years or so in graduate school getting a Masters and/or a PhD, and doing original research in their field. While this might not be true in your case, given that you apparently know everything, it is often true that being in a class with these people can actually teach you something you didn’t already know.
If you can pass the exams without ever turning up to class, why go at all? Your local public library probably has all the books you need to read about the subject of your choice. Plenty of university professors have their syllabi listed online, so you could even find out with a simple Google search what readings they are choosing for their classes, and go ahead and find them for yourself. There’s absolutely no need to go to class; and there’s not even any need to enroll in the university in the first place.
So why did you enroll? Oh yeah, because you wanted the fancy little piece of paper that tells the world that you’ve done it. Well, if that’s want you want, then you need to follow the requirements of the people who know more about your subject than you do. Is that harder? Yes. Tough shit.
Academia has plenty of things to drive a person crazy, and plenty of incredibly rewarding and challenging things, too. Some people love it, and some people hate it, but who hang around most learn to deal with the inevitable problems while cherishing the good stuff.
But if academia is, in fact, turning into pointless hoop-jumping and silly rules and regulations, one of the causes is whiny bitch undergraduate students who think they already know more than their professors, who just want to be told what The Right Answer is, who want the degree without doing any actual work in order to get it, and who expect every class they take to be as entertaining, and as challenging to their intellect, as an episode of Glee.
Then you’re not going to achieve anything by making them rephrase the paper, just to get around some silly “don’t turn it in twice” rule. You think they’re going to look up new sources just for the hell of it? No way. If they were going to do that they wouldn’t have attempted to turn it in twice anyway.
The only class that would have some practical reason for making them do the rewrite is a writing class. In every other case you’re wasting your and their time.
Well put!
Justified on moral grounds. Her program changed requirements in midstream and she had to retake a few courses because that were now labeled XYZ204 instead of ABC204 and 4 units instead of 3. She was literally rewriting papers to the exact same prompts as before and considering she didn’t get requirement credit from the earlier classes because they did not have the same code as current requirements, it’s not really double dipping.
In that case, i withdraw my objection. When universities make bureaucratic changes like that, they should ensure that students don’t get screwed out of credit or status for work they’ve already done.
With regard to the recycling papers issue - I am fortunate enough to have students take several classes with me (I call them “groupies” or “stalkers,” depending on the day ). Sometimes, I’ll have students take more than one class with me in the same semester. And I have no problem with students writing one paper that meets the requirements for both classes, or if a student wants to use the same topic for a paper in one class that he or she used in a paper for a class from last semester.
However, both of those situations require a sit-down with me so that we can go over how to make sure that the resulting work meets the requirements of the assignment. For example, a student who writes a paper about gender development for my Developmental Psychology class can certain also wrote about gender development for my Social Psychology class, but obviously the focus for those papers is going to have to be different, in that the expectation is that the student is going to write about the concepts that are particular to that specific class. A student wouldn’t be able to completely recycle a paper, word for word, with no updates or rewrites to change the focus.
Compelled to note: That is extremely unusual. Typically (read: always) when a program changes requirements, it only changes for those who are freshmen the following year and later.
The Scottish Uni where I was last year in an MSc on Translation kept telling us the opposite, to use several of our courses to build up to the dissertation. We didn’t even know what was an acceptable dissertation topic but we were supposed to choose the articles for our anotated bibliography so they’d also get used in the dissertation, the genre analysis was supposed to be linked to (and reusable in) the dissertation, etc.
As an undergrad I was ChemE in Spain, so no essays to hand in, thank God! (Or St Iggy Loyola, since the school was founded by a Jesuit) (In Spain the well-rounded education is supposed to have been obtained in High School, so no “general culture” requirements; I have the theory that that’s linked to our calling Bachiller the HS degree while y’all reserve Bachelor’s for university)