I give two separate handouts on what I’m looking for in an essay: one devoted to the qualities of good writing (clarity, thoroughness, and so forth), with definitions of what I’m looking for and explanations of how to do it poorly and how to do it well; the second is devoted to grades: this is what I mean by an A, and so forth. They get sample essay for every assignment, and do in-class peer-editing for every assignment. I also require them to go the Writing Center for every paper. And I STILL hear the same tripe about not knowing that HOW they wrote is as important as WHAT they wrote.
I would ask the instructor. Some like you to write completely new material for their class, others don’t mind if it’s something like a short story that will be peer edited to death before it leaves the room.
Ask the instructor. Back in the days when I used to have my composition students write a research paper on a topic of their choice, I was more than happy to have them use the opportunity to work on an assignment they’d been given for another class, as long as the other instructor didn’t mind. The students learned how to apply the skills they were learning in freshman comp to another course, the other instructor got a paper that had been through a rigorous drafting and editing process instead of one dashed off at midnight on the day before the due date, everybody won. I don’t do that any more because I changed this particular assignment to something more specific and idiosyncratic, but it was a nice set-up while it lasted.
This is now officially regarded as plagiarism at my academic institution, if the work is re-submitted in its exact entirety with no revisions. The Judicial Affairs office even knocked out a handy-dandy Plagiarism Quiz to help students determine if their actions could be punishable in ambiguous situations like the one you described; see question #3.
See, at that point, I would have said “We have covered the format for citations several times over the course of this class. If you weren’t paying attention, tough shit.”
But then again, I am not a teacher, and have no plans to become one.
Like Yamirskoonir, I also work for a school that has defined it as plagiarism. The element of originality is important to any piece of scholarship (if that’s not too grandiose a term for some of the abominations I’ve been grading this week). By resubmitting one of your papers, you haven’t done any original work for that class. You’re submitting pre-existing work (that you did of course, but still) as original work for a current class. Just ask John Fogerty how it’s possible to plagiarize from oneself.
So I don’t need a dictionary, thank you very much.
I got an email a few weeks ago from a prof at another college; a student essay handed in to her was a 100% match on turnitin.com for one given to me. Turns out the kid had transferred, and was now handing it in to her after handing it in to my class a year ago.
Sad thing was, the paper was an F to begin with. :rolleyes:
I’ve heard of schools doing that, but they don’t have the right to re-define words. As I said, it might be cheating, but it is NOT plagiarism. If I say I have two cars when I only have one, I’m lying, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stolen the car I have.
What I should say is that just because some administrative ad hoc group is careless with defining words, it doesn’t change the meaning of the words for the rest of us.
Forgive me, but this is complete and unmitigated bullshit. First of all, it doesn’t meet the definition of plagiarism:
Schools and administrators arbitrarily change the definition of words for their own obscure reasons and then get upset when students don’t completely understand their rules! What’s wrong with this picture? Shouldn’t institutions of higher learning stand for objectivity, fairness and above all, accuracy? [Inigo Montoya] “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”[/Inigo Montoya]
Second of all, what we’re seeing here is simply academic arrogance. Every professor feels that his or her subject is vitally important to every student when in fact for all but a tiny minority of students, it’s nothing more than a box to be checked off an their transcript. If a professor wants my work on a given subject and they get my work on a given subject, then they can grade it on it’s merits and take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut if the paper wasn’t exhaustively prepared solely for their oh-so-special class.
Look, I am as against plagiarism as anyone (actual plagiarism, not something-else-we-make-believe-is-plagiarism), you can thank Professor Blumburg and his historical research class for that, his mantra of “be pedantic, be pedantic, BE PEDANTIC!” drove the point home to all of us, and was a required course for all history majors, but this is stupid. Would you fail Einstein if he submitted his theory of relativity for consideration because it wasn’t completely rewritten for your class? I hope not.
I agree with this 100%. Turning in your own past work is not plagiarism.
I absolutely would.
The example of Einstein is particularly ill-chosen. Einstein had little respect for stuffed-shirt academics and the pointless hoops they made students jump through, true. But I believe that he would regard any prof who let him get away with that kind of crap as beneath his contempt because that professor was failing in his mission as an educator by not challenging his students to expand their minds.
Think about what you’re saying . . . that Einstein (Einstein!) should have been allowed to rest on his past laurels and get A’s in any physics class he chose to enroll in, and never have to bestir himself to learn anything new? I cannot speak for him, of course, but I’m pretty sure he’d find that notion laughable.
I don’t give assignments just to make students’ lives misearble. I don’t give them so that students can demonstrate what they already know. I give them so that students will explore a new idea, learn new things about it and hopefully think it through in a new way.
If you don’t want to do the work for my “oh-so-special” class, you do not deserve credit on your transcript for my “oh-so-special” class. The rest of the class is going to the trouble to write original papers. Why should you get a free pass on an assignment just because you’ve written on similar topics in the past? That’s not fair to the students who’ve had to research the topic from the ground up. You don’t have to respect me or care passionately about the subject of my class, but you do not get to weasel out of the course workload by regurgitating something from a past class instead of doing original work.
If Einstein came to me and said, “Prof. Fries, as you may be aware, I have already published several papers, notes and letters on the topic you have assigned. I wonder if it might be possible for me to write on a slightly different topic. I’ve been playing with some ideas for a ‘Grand Unified Theory’ that, while it doesn’t exactly fall within the assigned topic, would significantly expand the scope of my previous work,” then I’d be fine with letting him do something a little out of the ordinary as long as it was relevant and it required him to expend a effort comparable to the other students’.
So how do professors feel about students that sell their work to other students? Is it cheating, or is it free enterprise?
When I was in school I lived down the hall from a complete musical moron named George. He once paid me to copy some parts for a chart he’d written. It was clear that he didn’t understand even the very basics of meter or rhythm, much less harmony and melody. Some of the notes he wrote weren’t even notes. Every single thing I copied I had to interpret so that it would make some small modicum of sense as horrible written music, as opposed to bad modern art.
George was in imminent danger of failing the course. His last project needed to be near perfect just so he could get a D. He asked me to help him write it. I told him I’d do it for $25. Being that I lived on an allowance of $5/week, and he was getting $200/week from daddy, I had no problem taking his cash.
So I set to work on his final chart. At first I was going to make some George-like mistakes, so that it would look like his work. But then a funny thing happened – I got inspired. Within two hours I had written a masterpiece. It was my best work to date. No way I was going to dumb it down.
When it came time to give it to George, he said something like “I decided that I shouldn’t have to pay for this. I figure that since it’s my class, then it’s my work, and no way I’m paying for my own work.” George logic. I made it clear that if he wanted to pass his class, he was going to pay me what he owed me. He paid.
When he turned it in and it was played by classmates, the class was astonished at how un-moronic George had become in the last week. The teacher’s comments were “A+! Nice work, George! See me after class.” The teacher got George to confess to cheating, then passed him anyway. I think he was just glad to get rid of him.
The notion that students cannot build on earlier work, expand on it, re-explore, redraft it, is compeltely at odds with the nature of scholarship, which is that any document is a work in progress, especially those works early in a person’s scholarly career. I would ENCOURAGE students to go back to earlier work, and either strengthen them or reinvent them.
The notion that revising old work is plagiarism is dangerous because it tells students, (a) that plagiarism is an arbitrary school whim because it means whatever administrators say it is, and has nothing to do with the cut-and-dried ethics of actual plagiarism, (b) reinforces the idea that the work for any class is nothing but a classroom task that will be read by no one but the teacher and die there, thereby demotivating students from seeing their work in the context of scholarly process, and (c) because it is are direct odds with the true nature of scholarship.
This doesn’t mean students can hand in the exact same paper. The idea is based completely on the value of having students revise and rework old papers, which is exactly what universities should be doing.
The greater cause of higher education is not helped a whit by officious, self-righteous instructors who are high on rules and down on students. If they aren’t learning, it means we failed as teachers as much as it means they failed as students.
I believe at my school students were not supposed to turn in any work moe than once a semester. But taking portions of your own work and changing it for a new class probably was alright. I never bothered to haul my old crap anyway, though.
In one sense, the Einstein example isn’t very clear, because I was thinking (perhaps too literally) about a scientific theory (which would be presented, not an essay, but as a series of mathematical derivations.) But I intended to imply that the idea of expanding and reworking is okay, as long as the student is putting an appropriate amount of effort into the work. And, indeed, I would say that it’s pointless to make a student write another essay on the same topic, just for the sake of writing a new essay. In that situation, much more is to be gained by revisiting the previous work (though most of the IRL examples of this I’ve encountered, the student was looking to shoehorn an assignment on a related topic into the criteria of the current assignment.)
If the student wants to revamp and expand a previously written essay, or Einstein wants to expand his work on relativity to include and attempt at the Grand Unified theory, that’s fine, as long as there is new work commensurate with doing the assignment from scratch.
OK, off the subject of plagerism which makes me furious; this is my favorite student “unfair” story.
I give practice tests in all of my classes so students can get some clues about how many questions I ask, how hard they are, etc. These are always tests from previous semesters*. The students then work the test in class and I go over common mistakes and generally try to clear up misconceptions.
One semester fully half the class walked out after picking up the practice test. Just blew off my class. So I gave the practice test as the real test and most of the walk-outs failed it. One of the walk-outs had the nerve to come to my office and complain that I “tricked” him and that giving the practice test as the real test was “unfair” because “everyone knows that you would never give the same questions twice.” hehehehe
*I used to put all my previous tests on reserve in the library (with solutions) but quit because the students were tearing out all but the first page of the material. Why do this? I don’t grade on a curve, copies are only a 5 cents, what’s up with this?