I seem to remember writing a short story in high school that was a sequel of a short story that I had written previously, in the sense that the main character of the previous short story was the main character in the sequel and the theme and/or content were similar.
Teacher? I want to change my answer!
Of course if you ask the professor he’ll say no.
It’s like when I was a kid, there was an older kid Brian. He used to get $10.00 to cut his lawn.
He’d give me $5.00 to do it. He was 14 and I was 9. I was very happy to make $5.00 for the lawn.
It’s along the same lines
In reality the lawn is only worth $5.00 to cut. That’s what the parents could’ve paid me direct, but they didn’t know. Had Brian asked his mother if it was OK to delegate the work to me, they’d say “no,” and he was violating the spirit.
Perhaps he was, but it’s more likely the parents would be mad, not for the “violation of the spirit” but because they were suckers by paying $10 for a $5 job.
If you ask a professor he’ll say “no,” because it violotes the spirit and you’re not “learning” etc
But why he’d really be mad is because his assignment was so uninspired that you could pass off work from a prior course and still get a good grade. As a professor his assignments should be such that they are unique and not subject to duplication or outsourcing.
While I agree it’s fun to debate things for the sake of fun, in the OP it’s misrepresntation not cheating. You’re representing something as an original product, when it’s original but not to that class.
It’s like let’s say I’m on salary as a songwriter for Coyote Records. And I write a song called “The WB Song” and the company says, “This is awful, I hate it.” Now according to my contract, any song I write is my property to do what I want." So I was paid under a salary to write a song the company didn’t want. But legally it’s my song now.
Then Mr RoadRunner offers me a hundred bucks to write an original song. So I give him “The WB Song” and he loves it.
Was that cheating? No it’s an original creation, but it’s a misrepresentation as well. As I was supposed to create an ORIGINAL FOR HIM.
In the end I get paid twice for my song and everyone is happy. No cheating but misrepresentation.
In the end the OP question is just along the lines of following the letter of the law but violating the spirit of said law
I’d suggest checking the school’s policies on work turned in. That’s what should be followed. If it’s OK under their policy, then it’s OK. If the school policy says it’s OK, you could ask the instructor about it, but really, if you’re following the instructions for the assignment and following the school’s rules, you shouldn’t need to.
If it’s not OK, it’s not OK, unless you get specific approval from the instructor.
I see no reason why you’d need to ask the previous instructor’s opinion.
I managed to take a paper I had written as a high school senior and recycle it into three other papers, including one I wrote in my final semester in college. I didn’t just slap a new cover page on it, of course, but I did use it as the backbone for the other papers, even lifting entire sections verbatim.
Years later I mentioned this to my wife, a teacher. She was horrified and quite angry and told me it was plagiarism. The point of writing a paper, she explained, is to actually write it – to do the research, draw the conclusions and present the information in a coherent form. What I had done, she insisted, was simply type a paper.
She also strongly implied I should go back to my college professors, admit what I had done, take an F in the three classes and quite possibly forfeit my degree.
I disagreed. In fact, I still disagree. But her opinion is shared by many teachers. If I were you, I’d ask first.
At my school, we had a long discussion about this.
Scenario 1: During finals week, students have to turn in two papers: a draft essay based on a style of writing for that level, and an in-class, timed essay with an unknown question/topic. Sometimes, the draft essay will accidentally be the same topic as the timed essay. If a student uses part of their draft essay for the timed essay, is that cheating? The answer is “No,” the student got lucky but shouldn’t be punished for this.
Scenario 2: However, another topic that came up: can a student recycle papers from past terms? That answer was a flat “No” if the paper was written in a different level. We defined this as “self-plagarization.” However, if the student failed, repeated the level, and then wanted to use their old paper, that was up to the teacher to accept or not. The difference was that the old paper was already graded and thus gave the student an unfair advantage if turned in again.
Instead of your own, why not just turn in someone else’s paper?
At my university (I’m a student) this is considered plagiarism. I’d have a look at your university’s policy to check though.
It was considered plagiarism at my college. However, I once wrote most of a paper on Macbeth for Intro to Literary Criticism, then decided to go with another topic that hewed more closely to the guidelines of the assignment; I never turned in any of the original paper. Six months later, in the class I took on Shakespeare, I ended up using a large amount of that paper in my final paper, because it was actually pretty good, and fit well with the assignment (though, since the assignment was still a bit different, it was more a scaffolding). That was considered okay, though, since I’d never actually submitted the work for a grade anywhere before.
On the other hand:
I took a creative writing class. In the years before I took that class, I had done hundreds of pages of practice stories, and turned them in during the term. They had never been seen by anyone until I used them for that class. I felt no guilt at all in turning those in.
In grad school this was explicitly stated as intellectual fraud – I’m sure some professors wouldn’t have minded if I’d told them, or even known in the first place, working interdisciplinarily, but it would have felt like a big cheat to me.
Now, the research itself – every reasonably high-level class expects and perhaps demands that research be cumulative and progressive. At least in the humanities. And it wouldn’t be a literature paper in whatever language if you didn’t have large block quotes from the usual suspects in whatever paper you were writing.
Yup. Like simply writing shit is your education.
ETA: Simple quotes are misleading, I was agreeing with **Zsofia **entirely.
For programming, this makes sense, since reusing code is not just standard practice, but efficient programming. For all others, it’s cheating. I’ve probably done it though. It depends if it’s a class I care about or not.
I can understand why a prof would not be pleased with a student using his/her own, already completed material as a primary basis for a paper, but frankly, I don’t see an educational reason for disallowing it:
If the purpose of the assignment is to evaluate a student’s ability to write a paper with proper form, how does a ‘recycled’ paper impede that goal?
If the purpose of the assignment is to evaluate a student’s ability to research and develop an argument, how does a ‘recycled’ paper impede that goal?
If the purpose of the assignment is to evaluate a student’s mastery of the subject matter, how does a ‘recycled’ paper impede that goal?
If it so happens that in the course of four years and 120-200 thousand dollars that there are classes that evaluate me on overlapping criteria, how is it my problem if I come to class with the skills already? If a prof. assigns a research topic that I’ve researched before, or for some other reason have specific and detailed knowledge of, am I ‘cheating’ by using that knowledge and skipping the research part?
-Eonwe, who sat, bored, through a number of college courses where he already knew the material. But, if they needed to collect my $1,500 per course in order to justify giving me a piece of paper that says I’ve mastered the material, then that’s their business. And how I accomplish the assignments is my business, as long as it is my own material I’m handing in.
I specifically asked a professor about this topic before. The answer was a flat, “No, it’s cheating.” So instead of writing one paper that semester, I wrote two.
I turned in a paper a couple weeks ago in which I pulled some chunks from a previous paper I wrote a couple semesters ago. Technically, I could have cited my own paper as an unpublished source. Instead, I reworded the passages to fit my current topic and cited the sources I originally drew from.
It violated the spirit of the regulation, but not the word. But since I used the chunks to form a final example supporting other research I had already done, it didn’t hurt me to do it. And it seemed less… intellectually masturbatory… than citing my own paper.
Wow, Eonwe. If I voiced my opinion, I’d probably get accused of plagiarizing yours.
For all of the reasons already offered, I would not feel it was wrong. But I would still cover it up, because I know that not everyone agrees with me. I am very much opposed to getting in trouble for things that I do not believe are wrong.
That said, I once reused a high school English paper as a college speech, and I got a 10 point difference. It’s actually a bit harder to repurpose old material into new requirements, at least, for me.
It is wrong because you haven’t demonstrated that you have actually done anything in that class, or learned anything new - yet you are rewarded (marked) as if you had.
To use an analogy: when I was in university, I (perhaps foolishly) took Chinese language as an elective. I had no background in Chinese or indeed in languages. The course was expressly a “beginner’s course” and I was a total beginner. I worked like a dog on that class, as Chinese is a notoriously difficult language to learn. Many others taking the class were actually Chinese in background, and were (falsely) claiming to know nothing of the language - but took the course anyway, hoping of easy top marks they needed to get into other programs. They were horribly dissapointed to learn that the teacher marked on improvement over the course of the year, not on absolute ability - thus I (who could hardly speak well, even after a year) got a reasonably good mark, while they (who could speak fluently) did not … their arguments were much the same as yours: if the point was to evaluate mastery of the subject, why were they not getting straight A’s?!
I don’t think it’s cheating. You can’t steal your own ideas and you already did the work once. No Honor Council would convict you.
Small anecdote: Last week during my Engineering Statistics discussion session (the last class pretty much everyone had before Spring Break), the T.A. forced us to use the hour to redo problems then turn them in at the end of the hour for credit. We asked if we could simply copy down the problems and she said yes. This was the most pointless assignment I ever received in my academic history. Regardless, if a professor or T.A. assigns you problems you already did, then they would be hypocritical not to accept a paper you already did.
I present a plagiarism workshop at the university where I teach. Our school’s stand on turning in a paper you’ve written for another class is that because the educational process is progressive and you are–or should be–always growing, a paper that you wrote six months ago does not represent who you are now. You are, essentially, cheating yourself by presenting a paper that shows where you were six months ago, not where you are now. It impedes growth.
Well of course you’re cheating yourself. But are you, in fact, cheating?
I say no.