I loved my classes and WAS inspired by the teachers; but I was also working a full-time desk job and cleaning houses on the weekends along w/ my three 4 hour twice weekly evening classes. Was I too busy to be in college? Probably. But that behemoth paper and all its little babies helped me to succeed in a challenging situation.
And not to downplay the subject, but I was a History major, not a medical student; it was a victimless crime, if the only victim was my own unchallenged intellect.
We call it plagiarism, not cheating. And our student manual states that you are not to turn in something you’ve already submitted in another class, so students should already be aware that it’s not acceptable to do that.
To the extent that school work and marks matter, the victims were everyone else in the class - whose work and marks are devalued by the plagarism/cheating/whatever.
Another way to look at it: Students often need to purchase the required newer edition of a textbook they may already have. The textbook author (99% of the time a professor) will generate new income even though the new textbook is 95% old material (especially true in subjects like low-level science and mathematics, where the principles haven’t changed in centuries).
Thus, the author/professor is “rewarded” with new income even though he submitted mostly previously done work. How is this any different than submitting a paper you’ve already written?
Because a book is an end product. It’s perfectly okay, assuming proper permissions are secured, to hire a ghostwriter to write your book. You can hire researchers and editors, such that you only have a small hand in the final product. What matters is at the end, you have a book. If you don’t feel like writing your own book, it’s even okay to go to the bookstore and buy a book and do whatever with it.
A university assignment is a process. The steps taken in doing the assignment are equally as important as the finished product. Professors are not evaluating you on if you have once managed to produce a decent piece of writing in your life. They are evaluating you on how well you did the assignment- which is usually writing an essay from start to finish. In order to complete the assignment, you have to do all of the steps.
For example, if I am assigned a chemistry lab to test my blood type, can I just say “Oh, I already know I’m type AB” and fake the lab report since you already know the steps and the results? Of course not. The point of the assignment is that you actually do the assignment.
Anyway, this whole debate shows a worrying lack of academic integrity. School is not a big contest to outwit your professors. You should be striving, at all times, to take positive actions towards keeping your academic integrity. If you have questions about what is ethical and what is not, there are numerous people who will gladly answer them.
I think I wasn’t clear enough. Suppose a professor wrote a textbook himself. The second edition of the textbook contains roughly 95% of the text that was in the first edition, except that he updated some of the chapter questions. He’s still submitting his old work as new work.
Do you really think so? I don’t. I’ve reused many papers that I wrote; especially in grad school where any paper you write starts out at 20 pages in length as a requirement. Did I ever turn in the EXACT SAME PAPER? Well no. But only because no teacher is going to give the exact same requirements. Jeez, I already did the research; why not take advantage of that research. I would edit/revise the paper but it would still be the same topic. One example off the top of my head is a paper I wrote on Wireless Sensor Networks. I originally wrote it in an undergrad systems network course. In grad school I know I used it least twice more… once in another network class; once in an operating systems class, and I want to think I used it one more time. Each time the focus of the paper was different but the subject was the same.
I would argue that the purpose of almost any undergraduate course ought to be about mastery of the subject material and methods presented in the course, not whether you’ve learned anything new. If “learning something new” was a requirement for good grades, then the university ought to have ‘lack of experience in course material’ as a course requirement.
In the example you gave about the Chinese language class, I would ask:
[list]
[li]Why did the university allow Chinese speakers to take an intro course? Is there a system in place to prevent this?[/li][li]Why were the students surprised about what they were being graded on? Was it laid out clearly in the syllabus on day one? If “progress” was laid out there, then these students dug their own graves, most definitely.[/li][li]Why shouldn’t a person with the knowledge, and the money to pay for it, be granted credit for a course?[/li]
Frankly, I’d say anyone grading a college class on “improvement” is doing it wrong. Improvement says nothing about ability at the Chinese language, and so says nothing about one’s ability to pass onto a more advanced course.
Not to sound like I have an axe to grind (well, maybe a small hatchet 
), but this is an example of one of the most egregious disservices that the institution of Higher Learning does to our students.
I agree with you that the educational process is progressive, etc etc. However, in most cases, universities do not grade ‘progressively’ or based on ‘growth’. If I am applying for a job after college, does my degree tell my prospective employer that I successfully grew as a person and learner, or that I know a lot about my particular major? Does the guy who writes great papers and makes great arguments throughout the course deserve a lower grade than the guy who didn’t get what was going on at first but made great strides midway through the semester?
[anecdote]
I spent a year and about $3,000 dollars taking two intro-level classes in my professional field back when I had thoughts about getting degreed in it. I could not test out of these required courses, and they were frankly a waste of my time. I learned nothing. I aced the classes. It was bad enough I was made to take the courses, if my prof. had decided that I wasn’t showing enough ‘growth’ in my intro-level course and docked my grade, shit would have hit the fan.
[/anecdote]
College is a very costly endeavor. I get, from an educator’s perspective, the desire to foster growth and all that stuff. But this is not k-12, when everyone is stuck at school, the subject matter is light and moves slowly, and everyone is busy learning how to be adults. This is a career choice. A $100,000-$200,000 investment in one’s career, and to play at giving lessons about cheating oneself out of an educational opportunity when the students are the ones paying the teachers is kind of a joke.
If I take two undergrad courses towards my major, and they cover the same material, then yes, handing in the same paper twice (or using the same notes to write different papers, or whatever) does mean that I will not be learning something new, but it also means that the university is misusing my 1000s of dollars, if they think that having a student repeat information and assignments in multiple classes is good use of his/her time and money.
Yeah.
Like ghost-writing, that is one of the many things that are permissible in the world of professional book publishing and are not permissible in the world of academic assignments.
That’s why the lab assignment is likely not “What is your blood type?” It’s a requirement to be at lab with my partners (probably at some disgusting time like 7:45AM 
), keep a notebook, run an experiment multiple times, chart data, etc etc, and hand all that in to the professor. Labs are great examples of assignments based on process.
I’ve had many lit classes where I’ve had to hand in notes, outlines, drafts, etc etc, which is a way for teachers in the humanities to hold a student accountable for process, and to help teach process.
“Hand in a paper on ____” is a horrible assignment if you’re concerned about how the student got his/her information, what steps she/he took in preparing for it, etc. It’s not about students gaming the system, it’s about designing and structuring assignments to achieve what you want as an educator.
I disagree that this is about academic integrity. I think it’s more about whether educators are justified in expecting students to adhere to some un-codified ideals about the “right” way to learn, when their system (or the system of their employer) of evaluation and rewards do not reflect those ideals at all.
There are some schools where I understand they are much more process oriented (Hampshire, for instance, I think?), but that is far from the norm.
You may argue that it ought to be - but it is not, nor do I think it ought to be. The purpose is not to simply show up, demonstrate mastery, and be rewarded by marks. It is “supposed” to be about learning stuff. Part of that learning includes learning about ethics, which includes abiding by both the spirit and letter of a certain code of conduct.
Particularly in the humanities, the actual subject-matter of the course is secondary to the skills and discipline of completing the course properly. It is far more important to learn to budget one’s time and draft a good essay while respecting the ethical boundaries of the college, than it is to create a really good essay on the influence of Saxon verbs on Shakespear or whatever.
[quote]
In the example you gave about the Chinese language class, I would ask:
[list]
[li]Why did the university allow Chinese speakers to take an intro course? Is there a system in place to prevent this?[/li][/quote]
It was supposed to be the case that only intro people took the course. I suspect that the university found this difficult to police.
[quote]
[li]Why were the students surprised about what they were being graded on? Was it laid out clearly in the syllabus on day one? If “progress” was laid out there, then these students dug their own graves, most definitely.[/li][/quote]
They were told, but did not really believe it.
[quote]
[li]Why shouldn’t a person with the knowledge, and the money to pay for it, be granted credit for a course?[/li][/quote]
Because those marks were significant. Many of the students wanted an “A” to boost their marks to get into very selective programs, like Med school. The university thought (and I agree) this ought to be by merit, not by purchase.
You had to “improve” enough to meet the course parameters for a beginner course, of course, if you expected a passing grade.
What the instructor meant was that if you spoke fluently at the beginning - and spoke no more fluently at the end - you didn’t actually do anything in the class, did not demonstrate any improvement, and did not earn the same mark as someone who busted their ass all year and met the course parameters at the end - even though in absolute measure your actual ability may be greater.
To begin with, this is not about grading on progression or effort, but rather about grading by the willingness and ability to see a project through all of its steps.
And if I am hiring, you bet your boat that I’d hire the person who consistently challenges themselves to rise to the the best of their ability than the one who skates by on doing the minimum. I want to hire the person whose intellectual curiosity and dedication drives them to take a project as far as it can go, not the person who slavishly follows the minimum requirements and figures that’s good enough. I want the one who does things right, not the one who figures their job is over when it’s “good enough.” There are plenty of jobs for people who treat everything in life as a routine to be trudged through with minimal effort, but if you are looking for something more than you have to give more.
This is the “adversarial” relationship I am talking about. If a teacher or program is not challenging you or encouraging you to learn, it is 100% your job to go talk to them and see how you can fix that. In this situation, you know exactly how the program is not pushing you (having overlaps in assignments) and you know exactly how to fix that problem (choose topics that do not overlap.)
If you are constantly looking for shortcuts, fake-outs, loopholes and quick fixes, you are going to find them. As members of a community of adults who have a common purpose, teachers are under no obligation to make it literally impossible for a determined slacker to slack.
A student has a greater responsibility towards their education than the teacher. Your teacher is there to guide you, to inspire you, and to help you. But they are not responsible for educating you. That is your job. Your $1,000 of dollars are not an exchange of money for knowledge, but rather admission into an academic community that is geared towards. There is no amount of money you can pay to have knowledge implanted in your head. There is nothing you can pay to be forced to learn. You have to play an active role.
It sounds to me like you are a very technically oriented person who wanted a degree to fulfill requirements and develop specific targeted job skills. It seems like you’d be a better candidate for a vocational or technical program than an academic one.
What level of revision would qualify a paper as acceptable then? I did something pretty similar to Nawth Chucka when I was in undergraduate.
It started out as a small-scale research paper on data compression concepts for my first semester computer science programming course and was 4-5 pages or so. It ended up 4 years and 3 classes later as a senior seminar class 12 page research paper on data compression concepts and their applications. Somewhere in between it was a technical research paper (technical writing class) and a “Current topics in data communications” essay for a MIS department Networks and Data communications class.
It certainly wasn’t the same paper each time, and it was considerably larger and better by the time I last used it, but the core paragraphs about LZW and Huffman coding were pretty much unaltered all the way through.
I learned quite a bit along the way, and in MUCH more depth than if I’d simply cranked out new papers for each assignment. That’s got to be worth something that writing surface-level papers on different topics isn’t.
According to the attitude of some of my current and former students, it is. A small percentage of my students seem to see me as the enemy, forcing them to engage in activities against their will and without their consent, and it’s their job to figure out how to game the system so that at the end of the semester, they get a grade on their transcript. Their actual interest in the process of learning or in the content of my course is miniscule at best. They seem to see every assignment I give them as a personal insult, regardless of how often and thoroughly I explain the pedagological reasons for my lesson plans and assigned work.
Any attempt on my part to point out that they are in school by their own choice is met with apathy at best.
This is what I do for my large research projects, and it’s called scaffolding. My students have generally not ever written a research paper, and if they have, they generally have not gotten good training in accessing research databases, accessing the quality of research, reading peer-reviewed journal articles and understanding the information well enough to form their own hypotheses, etc.
So, I break down the project into lots of little steps so that I can guide them along the way, to make sure that they are not going off into the weeds early on.
Again, I have no problem with a student coming to me and saying “hey, I did this research paper for this other class, can I use that for this class?” and the two of us having a discussion about whether or not the subject matter or the process fits my requirements. But students have to have that conversation with me first.
I’ve even offered to allow students who are enrolled in multiple classes with me in the same semester to develop their own over-arching project that would fit the requirements of both (or all) of the courses they’re taking with me. Some of the students who’ve take that offer have developed some excellent projects.
There is a really simple way to find out what level is acceptable - namely, to ask the instructor.
I don’t understand the concept of “self-plagarization” at all. It’s all my original work. I did the research, I organized the ideas, I forumlated, developed and supported a thesis of my own original work. Why does it matter if I did it this semester or last year? It’s still my own original work.
Not only that, but if I’m assigned to do a paper on a topic I’ve already done a paper on, how much of that previous work do you think I’m allowed to re-use before it becomes “plagarism”? Can I use the same source material? The same arguments? The same examples? If not, why not, and if so, how is my new paper substantively different than my old one?
By all means PSXer’s friend should follow school policy. But a rule against using your own work is pretty dumb. I fail to see what you learn the second time that you didn’t learn the first time.
I don’t know why people suddenly lose their sense of responsibility and incentives when it’s “university” versus anything else.
Let’s say I decided my French needed some brushing up so that I could better work in aid relief in west Africa. I head down to the local Alliance Francais and sign up for one of their $400 French courses. Upon entering the class, I learn that they happen to be using the same book I used years ago in high school French. In fact, I saved my high school work and still have all the exercises done! I have some understanding of the work, but not mastery. What do I do?
I could just re-turn in my old exercises, but I think we’d all agree that would be really stupid and a waste of time and money, right?
More realistically, first I’d see if I really do have a solid understanding of the material. There is a good chance that doing some drills and review would still be helpful for me. If I was breezing through the work, I’d see if I could get into a more advanced course. If I could not, I’d probably talk to the teacher and see if I could do something to make the assignments more challenging- perhaps instead of writing disconnected sentences to practice a grammar construction, I could try to write a narrative. I bet the teacher would even be willing to review any extra work I was willing to do. If I couldn’t get the teacher to do that, and I really just needed to get the requirement done, I could still take advantage of the fact that the Alliance Francais has an amazing library, including instructional books, as well as movies, lectures, and cultural events. I could use those resources to do my own independent work focusing on what i need to know. I could take full advantage of having a community of people to learn French with and enter conversation groups and the like. There is so much that I could do to learn, even without the teacher forcing me to. And if I am paying so much money, there are good reasons for me to try my best to get my money’s worth.
But suddenly if it’s college, it’s all about shortcuts and getting away with whatever you can. It’s suddenly the teacher’s fault if you decide to slack.
Anyway, unless you are Bill Bryson, you are not a master writer. I’m a grad student who has never gotten below an A on a written assignment, and I still sharpen my research and writing skills each time I have an assignment. I don’t think there is a single undergrad that would not benefit from the process of practicing writing one more paper.
As for “Well, then, what are the exact limits?” Ask your professor.
I wholeheartedly agree. For instance, if I’m writing a letter to a client or drafting a motion, I could just find the appropriate, pre-written document in a database, plug in the case-specific information and give it a scan to ensure it all makes sense. But that would be cheating myself. Really, the correct course of action is to write an entirely new brief from scratch, because that’s the only way I’ll learn and grow as an attorney.
It’s different because the book clearly states Xth Edition on the cover or inside pages. If you want to use that analogy, the student should put the same thing on his or her paper and indicate where they’ve “published” it (i.e., what classes). Just my two cents, of course.
Plus, as noted above, you’re not going to write the same way throughout your lifetime. If you’re learning, your writing will evolve, too. As an author, reading my previous work - even that in print with a good editor - makes me cringe. I was a terrible writer then. My grad school papers were even worse. My writing now is much better, but it’ll probably make me cringe in another few years. The more I learn the more it changes, though, and I think that’s a good thing.
Also, I understand being busy. I put myself through my masters’ program working full time as an office manager/paralegal and part time as a seamstress and another part time job as a model. I spent virtually all my days and nights in my car, squinting at teeny tiny little beads, strutting in a wedding gown or reading. But all my papers were original. I’m not saying I never borrowed sources from my previous papers, but it never would have occurred to me that it was ok to hand in a previously-written paper as an original work.
It seems to me that the whole academic enterprise is about building on previous work. Let’s say I’m interested in how parents divide up child care responsibilities. For one class, I might write a paper on how the division of child care responsibilities varies by the education level of the parents; another version of the paper might ask how parents feel about the division of child care; maybe a third examines how the division shifts over time as children age. For each of these three papers, though, I’m going to cover a lot of the same ground. A lot of the literature review will be very similar. The motivation for the papers will be very similar. Depending, the data and methods might also be very similar. Each of these papers could be submitted to conferences, and certainly all three could be submitted to academic journals (although probably not very good ones, because these aren’t very novel research questions). Working like this allows a researcher to develop substantial expertise in his/her field. With this in mind, expecting a student to start completely fresh for each paper is a real waste of time. At the undergrad level, writing papers is partially about learning the craft of academic writing. However, research papers also should ideally create new knowledge, and you can’t do that without getting to know a field pretty well.
As a grad student, I made sure that there was significant overlap between the papers I was writing each semester, or at least between a previous semester’s papers and the current semester’s papers. If not, I would have spent all of my time on the lit reviews and never made it to doing actual data analysis. Also, becoming an expert in a couple of areas is much more conducive to professional success than knowing a little about everything.
As an instructor, I hope that my students make personal progress in my class, but I’m sure as shit not grading on anything other than the quality of the work they hand in. If, somehow, you’ve previously done some work that magically meets the criteria of the assignment for my class, feel free to turn it in. Frankly, I’ll be pretty surprised if you do have a paper that is appropriate.