I 'm sure I did cheat some, but I can’t ever remember doing so in elementary school, high school, or college. But, I do have a “reverse” cheating story.
I was a computer major and there were computer labs all over the campus. Only one stayed open all night though. I was at another lab across campus and sent a printout to the all-night lab. I arrived there a few hours later and first went to get my printout, but it wasn’t there. So I got a seat in this huge computer lab with the intention of sending another printout and then settling in for an all-nighter. I happened to sit next to a guy who was in my class but whom I didn’t know. I inadvertently looked down at the printout that he was so intensely interested in, and noticed that he was going to town typing my hard work into his own computer. Out of the hundreds of seats in this lab and I sit down next to the one guy who least wanted to see me. I told him he had taken my printout, and casually removed it from his prying eyes. The look of shock, and later utter embarrassment that crept across his face as he slunk out of the lab was truly priceless.
I wonder if that is actually considered cheating. I’d feel pretty bad about cheating and nowadays I’d take the F before cheating to get a good grade but I wouldn’t ever feel bad about recycling some work I did. You wrote it so what difference does it make? I’ve also never had a professor specifically tell the class they can’t do that. In middle school and stuff, the teachers would tell us to read a book we’ve never read before when doing our “book reports” but that’s the closest thing I’ve heard to not using a piece of writing you’ve written for another class.
That’s high school for you. There wasn’t much you could have really done about it. You either let them or you don’t. If you don’t they’ll spread the word the rest of your high school life would most likely be way too miserable.
Most of the college syllabuses I’ve seen that mention recycling papers require you to clear it with both the professor you originally wrote the paper for and with the professor who’s getting sloppy seconds. For some reason they hate the idea that someone else has had the chance to grade the paper first. I’ve never had two classes overlap in topics enough that one paper would satisfy two classes so I’ve never tried it out.
I’ve had the explanation as that it’s cheating insofar as it’s counterproductive to the learning process. If the point of writing a paper on a topic is to learn something new, then using the same paper twice teaches you nothing. I believe my school also had the policy of clearing an “updated” paper with your teachers.
In my high school, recycling your paper meant you could face expulsion, the same as if you had taken someone else’s work.
I don’t see anything wrong with reusing a paper that you wrote yourself. The point of the paper is to demonstrate your understanding of the topic, not to give you busywork to waste your time. Using your own work over again still proves you understand the topic even if that knowledge came from a prior class - and it’s not cheating if you can answer a question on a test based on prior knowledge of the topic rather than having read the answer in the class’s textbook.
Using other people’s work is a different matter. If I were a teacher, I’d do everything I could to catch people who plagiarize and take great pleasure in trying to destroy their academic career.
A girl was kicked out of my medical school class for cheating during our second year (and there was reason to think she had been cheating all along - it just took a while for them to catch her in the act). I’m very glad that my school had standards and took it seriously. I’m very dismayed at how lazy and apathetic some of the teachers described in this thread are, who must have realized there was a chance for dishonesty but didn’t care enough to try to prevent it or act on their suspicions.
All of my syllabi in the last few years have stated that recycling papers or projects is verboten. Prior to that was the “permission from both instructors” wave, but that’s gone now.
I think it’s ridiculous myself, for the same “prior knowledge isn’t forbidden on a test” rationale that **lavenderviolet **points out. I’m just cynical enough to think that instructors fear the “But Mr. Smith thinks this is an A paper and you gave me a C!” whining that is an inevitable part of the process.
Or is it possibly an artifact of the new plagiarism detection technology - are my papers being stored as they’re scanned, and so my paper from two semesters ago would cause a positive plagiarism result if turned in again today?
Or perhaps it’s school policy, and the teachers are just enforcing what they’ve been forced into.
Hah! I got away with the same thing in fifth grade for a written report. I copied the fly leaf word for word. I wonder what my teacher thought reading, “A tale of passion and intrigue ripped from today’s headlines!”
I can’t for the life of me remember which book it was, though.
Papers are, generally, supposed to reflect something you learned in the course of the class, whether content, analytic method, application of context, etc. Something you wrote prior to the class can’t have that. Also, if a professor teaching one class gives a paper an A and another teaching a different class gives it a C that’s hardly a problem: the quality of the paper is in part its fit with the assignment.
I’d argue (in fact, I’m arguing) that any teacher worth their salt can make that part of the assignment: “Use what you have learned in this course to compare and contrast the protagonists of *Harry Potter *and Books of Magic,” which makes this a moot point.
But no, most teachers instead say only “Compare and contrast the protagonists of Harry Potter and Books of Magic,” leaving themselves wide open to exploitation by wily students. Instead of thinking it over and fixing the assignment, they lay down the law in the syllabus.
I took Newspaper Writing I and II in the same symester my junior or senior year in college and used the same article at the same time for both classes about false alarms on campus. I got a decent grade on both, I don’t know if the instructors new each other but the school’s small enough that I imagine they would. I even changed the topic in the I class to match the II.
I have a reverse cheating story as well. My freshman year in high school for Earth Science, we had to turn in a write up of a science article found in a newspaper or non-science magazine and include the article every Friday.
One of the guys in the class often forgot his and *always * forgot if we didn’t have class on Friday and were supposed to turn it in on Thursday. So I clipped an article from the newspaper that featured Big John Studd calling out Refrigerator Perry before the Battle Royale of Wrestlemania 2 and typed up a recapp of the article on a typewriter so the teacher wouldn’t detect my handwriting.
Of course, Chad forgot to bring an article and I slipped the fake in well under mine in the basket to further the subtrifuge. We watched a movie that afternoon about dirt or errosion or something as the teacher graded the papers. Towards the end of the period, he handed the paper back to Chad and I could see him and his lab partner laughing.
After the bell rang, Chad came up to me with the paper, laughing about it. Marked on the bottom of the paper was “Not a science article, bring one on Monday.”
It actually worked in Chad’s favor as he would get full credit for the article because he actually “brought one in” the week before. Whether or not he brought one on Monday, I can’t recall.
The one I heard is to carefully take off the wrapper from a larger bottle of Coke or Pepsi. Write your notes on the inside of the label. Then you can drink down the level of Coke until it covers the inside of the label but you can still read your notes when the bottle is tilted at the correct angle.
I don’t think I know ANYBODY that didn’t program formulas into their graphing calculator in school.
I found that if you plagarized anything and rewrote in your own words, you would never get busted. I don’t know how many papers I “wrote” in such a fashion. Either for myself or for others. This was preinternet, but the same holds true, if it’s not a copy and paste job, it probably won’t be caught.
Sophomore year of college I had a real pain in the butt professor for Programming Structures class. He had a bi-weekly programming project that had to be emailed to him. 5% of your grade was just for turning it in. 15% more if it compiled. Technically a empty program will compile, so that’s easy. He took the code and ran it against 8 sets of input. He then did comparisons of the output versus his expected output. It had to be perfectly matched. For each match, you get 10%. if there was a single mismatch or type, you go no points for that set. He never looked at the code itself. The only thing he actually did to the code was compare it to the rest of the class and the code from the previous year to ensure there wasn’t any copying.
The trick is that he gave you 4 of the sets he was going to use as examples. So… if you’re a creative and less than moral person, you could write a program that just spit out a specific reply when given each of the 4 example sets. You match 4 examples and the 20% you get for the other things and you’re already at a 60%. Not good? Well, that was a B on the bell curve of the class. And B is for bar, which was my destination after a few minutes of coding.
The I feel most guilty about wasn’t really that bad, I guess. I was a senior in high school, taking an AP Calculus test. I sat right next to a friend of mine, who was a math genius and always had the highest grade in the class. Near the end of the test, I slid my eyes to the left to see what answer she had put down for a certain problem and was chagrined to see it was different than my own answer. Of course, I knew she had to be right and I was wrong, so I went back and double-checked my work until I found the error and corrected it. This was calculus, where the majority of the credit goes for showing the work, so I still worked out the problem by myself. However, I would have gotten it wrong if I hadn’t peeked.
Also, I might have fabricated a few quotes for my final article in my Magazine Writing class in college. All reporters do it, right? :o
During the mindfuck recovery I was taking a programming class and not doing so well. We got an assignment, and I asked for help from one of the girls in class, who was sitting next to me. We discussed program structure, functions, variables, etc. until I was satisfied I knew what needed to be done. Happy that I was going to do well for once, I went off and started coding. I handed the completed, working, program in pretty close to when it was due, satisfied that I’d done a good job. When I got the grade back a week later, I was shocked to see an F. I was told that the paper was obviously copied from one of the other students, and that I was lucky she hadn’t had me expelled. The girl I had talked to had handed in basically the same program, and got an A.
Almost always true, but it depends on how much your prof wants to push. I had a friend taking a college frosh writing class, and drew some conclusions that the prof thought were above his level. Something about having studied the text previously in HS in the original language or some such that gave him some good insights to the text.
The prof called my friend to his office and grilled him for 45 minutes about his paper. If he hadn’t studied the material extensively he would have been screwed.
