Let me ask you, what is the purpose of your class? Is it to impart a certain set of facts to the kids, or is it just to make them work hard? If you set as the criteria to pass your class that a student must prove knowledgeable about the theory of relativity by explaining the ToR in a paper written by the student, how is it acceptable to require Einstein to write a paper on Unified Theory just because he already has a paper he wrote that meets the criteria? A different paper isn’t your class, it’s Unified Theory 101! (hyperbole example) If I was a professor, and on day one of my class a student walked up to me and submitted a paper that fulfilled the requirements I had set for passing the class, took all the tests and passed them, I’d give him a passing grade and tell him to enjoy the rest of the semester in the Rathskeller. He would have proven to me that he has the knowledge that my class was designed to teach, ergo he passes.
As a descriptivist rather than a prescriptivist, I’d say that they do.
In any case, the school’s catalogue makes clear the policy on plagiarism. So whether students want to count resubmission as plagiarism or not, at least the school has told them up front that it considers it to be.
Oops; should have included this in my previous reply…
I agree. But at least within the confines of this one campus, we’ve agreed to an altered meaning. So I should have made clearer above that I wouldn’t necessarily consider this plagiarism within every community; but certainly within mine it is defined as such.
I encourage this too. For example, I had a student call me about four weeks ago. She was in my Intro to Fiction class as an undergrad and is now a grad student in the same department. For one of her seminars, she wanted to expand on something she did for my earlier class. I told to go ahead and do so, and that I appreciated her asking me about ahead of time.
But this is different from someone resubmitting the identical paper for two different courses.
Phew! One last one:
In light of my past three posts, I just want to add that cricetus is raising a lot of damn good ideas. I don’t want it to look like I’m out to target him/her.
(warm fuzzies in the Pit? Whod’a thunk it?)
As a student, I always found a good rule of thumb is to speak with the professor about it.
My classes are not merely intended to impart a certain set of knowledge. My classes are supposed to give students a certain set of skills. I do not think that my teaching philosophy is ususual in this regard.
If I assign a research paper, it’s not to see if the student knows (or can look up) the facts that are in the paper. To write the paper, the student needs to exercise his research skills to find appropriate sources and extract information relevant to his topic, exercise his rhetorical and logical skills to develop some kind of an argument based on the meaning of that information, and exercise his writing skills to present his argument and his evidence in a coherent manner.
Admittedly, the Einstein example is getting tired, but is Einstein in my class to go through the motions and get a A based on things he already knew coming in the door? If so, why the hell is he taking this class, and why am I, as his instructor, wasting his time? He could have negotiated with the department chair to test out of the class or something, based on his previous work. Or is he in my class to learn something new, and develop his skills, and come out of the class knowing more than when he came in? Even if he isn’t too keen on the idea, once he lands in my class I’m afraid that I consider it my job to ensure that he learns something from me.
It could be that my head is swelled too big to fit through the damn door, but I’ve got this wacky idea that I might have something to offer to my students. I’m not a bureaucrat whose job it is to merely administer tests that determine whether students have memorized a set of facts. Part of my job is to impart knowledge, yes, so that the students have the mental infrastructure necessary to think intelligently about the subjet, but I’m also here to teach them how a to formulate an argument, how to research the argument, how to support the argument with facts, how to distinguish an argument from an opposing argument, how to design tests find an argument’s flaws, etc.
And I think everyone can stand to improve those skills. (Myself included. I learn a lot with every class I teach.) The assignments I give are not hard work for hard work’s sake. You’re supposed to be learning something beyond the mere facts as you do that work.
Put simply, those wouldn’t be my criteria.
To get back to something more like the original topic, imagine that Einstein is taking a class like “Great Ideas in Modern Science,” and we’ve already done the paper on evolution and one on the importance of synthetic chemicals in modern life, and now the class has been assigned to write a paper on relativity. I’m not inclined just to give Einstein a “buy” on the paper because he already understands relativity. I want him to think about something new. He could write on the GUT. He could write something original on the philosophical implications of relativity outside the scientific community. He could write a children’s book explaining relativity to elementary-age students. I’m inclined to give him a lot of latitude on the topic he chooses and how he approaches it, but I do want him to learn something from the exercise, whatever it is.
For the record, if a student who didn’t already have a paper on relativity also wanted to take a creative approach to the subject, I would be open to that as well, but since the didn’t already have a body of work showing that they understood relativity, I’d want to make sure they demonstrated that knowledge in their project.
This, of course, is a different matter from simply turning in one previously written paper over the course of a semester.
Now, I don’t mean any offense, but it’s clear from that statement that you don’t really understand the mission of an institution of higher learning or typical policies at a college or university.
You get credit for a course, not just because you know the subject matter from the course, but because you did the work.
A student who clearly has a mastery of the subject but for some reason does not have academic credit for a course can usually get some kind of accomodation, like testing out to waiving the requirement for the course, but not getting any credit hours for it because . . . drumroll . . . he didn’t do the work for that course.
A student who, say, had already taken “Physics 433: The Theory of Relativity” would probably be forbidden to take “Physics 107: General Relativity for Fun and Profit” at our institution unless he could come up with a really good reason why the course was important to his education. If he did manage to get permission to take it, he most certainly would be expected to do all the coursework, not just turn in old work from the other class.
In other words, you couldn’t just run around enrolling in classes where you already know the material in order to rack up credit hours on your transcript and A’s on your GPA.
And Albert Einstein, having already obtained a PhD in physics from the University of Zurich, is unlikely to be permitted to enroll in any of my courses, no matter how edifying they are. 
Oh, absolutely, I agree 100%, but hasn’t the student already demonstrated that by writing the paper the first time around? 
A good point.
“Bye”. Hee hee. I make more than my share of spelling and grammar mistakes because I’m disgraphic, so I’m the last one who should be tempting gaudere’s law, but there’s something about seeing this mistake from a college professor that makes me itch to mark up my monitor with red ink! :)
But this is my whole point: If the requirement is for the student to do the work, and the hope is that he will gain valuable knowledge and skills from doing this work, why not give him credit if he’s already…wait for it…done the work! Why make him do it again?
That’s actually the situation I’m thinking of-a overlooked or unknown required course that ambushes a senior unexpectedly in his or her last semester-suddenly, they have to take this 2 or 300 level course and get credit for it to graduate, on top of the 12 or 15 4 or 500 level credits they had already signed up for, and need a way to lighten that load.
It’s no big deal, really, I just found the scenario interesting, and have enjoyed your uh…educating me as to your take on it. 
Because you’re not passing off someone else’s ideas as your own. If we went with that idiotic definition of plagiarism, I plagiarized my admissions essay for Pitt when I used a ‘based on actual events’ work of fiction that I wrote when I was 15 years old. I added a prologue to it telling the admissions department when and why I’d written that paper, and I got a hand written card back from the chair of Pitt’s English Department thanking me for the privilege of reading the paper, not scolding me for copying my own words.
And if you as an instructor do not understand that an assignment that feels like busy work will be treated as such, then you’d have to go out of your way to prove that I actually cheated on the assignment. Most professors do not state either in their syllabus, or when giving out an assignment that the paper has to be 100% original. It’s asinine to start from the ‘ground up’ on a topic that I’ve already done to death.
If you were my professor, and you gave me an assignment I’d already done previously, I’d take what I started with X years ago and then add whatever rexearch has changed in the last X years to it. I sure as hell wouldn’t just pretend I’d never done that assignment before.
That depends on the assignment. Some topics are so popular with college professors that unless I resorted to hysterical fiction, I really couldn’t come up with much ‘from scratch’ material.
That’s usually the idea of a class.Prove that you have an above average understanding of the material presented and you have earned a passing grade. Unless, of course, the professor’s a hard-ass who’d rather see you do 20 hours a week of useless work in which you gain no understanding of anything. What difference does it make how hard I had to try to demonstrate that I understand the material?
So if I resubmit a research paper that I previously wrote, complete with all the parantehtical references and the bibliography, how does this not demonstrate that I know how to do research or have basic writing skills? Your arguing that I have to sit down and do it exactly when you want me to, rather than that I have to be able to do those things. That, my friend, is busy work.
So that the registrar will type a letter onto the transcript. Which is pretty much what I paid for in several classes which were far beneath my level of knowledge and understanding but nevertheless required for a degree. So I sat through them, learned absolutely nothing new, and obtained a letter on my transcript.
Thanks for the correction on “bye”, Weirddave. Feel free to red-pen my posts whenever you like. Believe it or not, I do appreciate it. In the example you gave, of a senior “ambushed” with a course they technically had to take, but which would teach them nothing, well, some of the responsibility lies on the student to be sure their requirements are taken in order, and some lies with their advisor, who is supposed to be on the lookout for that sort of thing. I know of specific cases where students were in fact allowed to test out of a class, and the requirement was waived. But it’s always possible for bureaucrats to screw ya over, and you have to be on your toes about that sort of thing.
I think I can boil down my point of disagreement (with both Weirddave and catsix) to one thing:
I think that students learn something when they do an assignment. Assignments are not “busy work,” I don’t assign them just to “make kids work hard.” I assign them because doing the assignment will advance a specific pedagological goal.
Students are not just graded on whether they know how to do the assignment, they are graded on the fact that they actually did the assignment and how well they accomplished it. I don’t assign a paper saying, “Let’s see if the students know how to do a research paper!” I assign it thinking, “Let’s see what the students learn in the process of doing this paper.”
I do.
If your professor doesn’t, and your school doesn’t have a policy on the subject, then feel free to hand in an old paper. I’m not saying that this is an inherently dishonest practice. I just think that if you do it, and your professor allows you to do it, you’re missing out on an opportunity to learn something new and to refine your skills.
As I’ve said in every single post, if the student has already done something very similar in the past, I wouldn’t require them to do the exact same thing again. I’d be perfectly happy to let them revise their and/or expand their previous work in some significant way, or do their paper on a slightly different topic, or take some unique approach to the topic.
So your focus is on when something is learned rather than that it is learned? Because If I’ve already done the exact same assignment elsewhere, then I’ve already done the ‘learn in the process of doing this paper’ and doing it again would be busy work.
And when the assignment is roughly eqivalent to ‘recite the alphabet’ how many ‘unique takes’ do you think I could possibly come up with on that topic?
I think I exhausted those somewhere in kindergarten. Ask me to do a paper detailing the creation of the Internet and I can virtually guarantee that, having done such papers numerous times in the past, there is so little to be gained from doing it all over again or attempting a ‘new take’ that I’d be wasting effort and time that could be far better spent doing something that is new.
What professors often fail to understand is that my time is a finite resource. Having two papers assigned and due over the same two week stretch means that my time has to be divided between the two. If one is a subject I’ve already written on extensively before, and one is totally new, I will not let the new topic suffer while I waste time trying to satisfy the other professor’s desire for me to pound the books. Not going to happen. The one that I’ve done before will be glossed over, especially if I’ve done it numerous times before, and the one where I do actually have a chance of learning something new will get much, much more of my time and attention.
catsix, boy oh boy, your life is hard. Having to write two papers at a time? Completing all the work for the classes in which you are enrolled? Your professors just don’t understand that your time is finite? I weep for you, truly I do.
It’s not like I was ever a student who had lots of homework to do and papers to write. Nay, verily, I leapt, fully formed, from the forehead of the Dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, clutching a PhD in my moist and blemishless hand. Since then it has been my sole purpose in life to invent boring, repetitive, pointless assignments to occupy my students’ infinite free time. “Recite the alphabet” is one I hadn’t thought of, though. Thanks for the suggestion.
Look, if you turn in a paper in one class, IMHO, you’ve gotten credit in for that paper. If you want credit for a paper in my class, you need to either make significant revisions to your old paper or write me a new paper. (Have I mentioned that I’m pretty flexible on the topic? I don’t remember whether I have or not.)
You get my syllabus on the first day of class. If you think my policies are inhumanly unfair, you have a couple of weeks to drop the class, complain to my department chair, or have me assassinated for my hubris. If you stay in the class, I expect you to do the same amount of original work as every other student in the class.
I think I have said everything I can reasonably say on the subject, three or four times in most cases. Unless anyone has any more brilliant insights to share, such as “Students have to do work for classes other than mine,” or “Time only flows in one direction,” I think I’m pretty much done.
I’m not a student. I am telling you that a person’s time is a finite resource. If you want to waste a large chunk of it making them churn over the same exact thing they’ve already done, you’re allowing your ‘I am a professor’ ego to shield your eyes from reality. Nobody is going to invest the kind of time you want into proving they can recite the alphabet. It’s just not going to happen.
If you insist that they spend hours or days of their lives redoing something that they’ve already done just to satisfy yourself that they put enough time into your project, then you are inventing pointless, repetitive, boring assignments. You are also laboring under the mistaken assumption that free time is ‘infinite’.
No way would I do the ‘busy work’ of ‘making significant revisions’ to a paper that doesn’t need it. If the paper is complete and factually correct, there is no point in doing what you ask other than wasting time going through motions. You may be able to pull this bullshit over on a naive 18 year-old, but I don’t fix things that aren’t broken.
Which only proves that it’s not about understanding the material presented or research methodology or even writing. It’s all about how many hours the students devote to you, the almighty professor of what-the-fuck-ever.
You are exactly the kind of arrogant, asshole, I-am-the-center-of-the-universe professor whose classes I dropped in college and who I despise working with now. Get over yourself. Your class isn’t that fucking important.
catsix, I gotta ask: if your time is such a finite resource, why are you wasting so much of it beating this dead horse? Don’t you have other, more important things to do that are more worthy of your precious time?
Fine, then drop the class. No one’s forcing you to take a class you feel is pointless.
Who said anything about free time being infinite? You are laboring under the impression that all professors think their students have plenty of time for their class only. They don’t. However, what many professors do think that if one enrolls in his or her class that the student will put the time and effort necessary to do well (or, if barring that, at least enough to pass).
Futhermore, if you think that the class is a waste of time or you aren’t able or unwilling to do the work necessary to do well (or even pass), then you certainly aren’t going to hurt the professors feeling’s by DROPPING THE CLASS.
I find it highly unlikely that two professors are going to assign a written assignment that is exactly the same, therefore necessitating that one can pass off work done in a previous class. Even so, if you don’t like the fact that you can’t submit work previously done, then a simple solution is DROP THE CLASS!!
Gee, I guess you are under the mistaken impression that college is only about learning things like knowledge of a particular subject, or how to write papers, or research methodology. Guess what? It’s also about learning such things as: 1) college professors can be dictatorial assholes, just like other people in the “real world”; 2) college life often forces one to make decisions as to how one should spend one’s time - just like in the “real world”; college life exposes one to the boringness and repetitiveness of certain tasks - just like in the “real world.”
Fortunately, one has some flexibility in college. If you don’t like a professor because he/she is a dictatorial asshole, he/she assigns boring and repetitive work, and you have better things to do with your time - easy: DROP THE CLASS!!
I bet you’re a hoot to work with. I wonder how you would react to your boss if he asked you to do something that had been done previously (“But boss, I already did that with the Smiith file last month. Why do you want me do the same work I did with the Smith file for our new client?” It’s so boring, pointless, and repetitive!!).
And you are correct that the Podkayne’s class (and the classes I teach) aren’t that important in the greater scheme of things. Fortunately for you there’s a thing called choice - you don’t have to take the class.
It’s all a choice. People have a lot more choices than they realize.
When they ask things like “Do we have to take the final?”; “Do we have to buy the textbook?”; “Do we have to type the final draft?” ; “Do we need to bring a blue book?” etc., my answer is always the same:
“You don’t HAVE to do anything. But if you choose not to take it, buy it, type it, or bring it, there are certain repercussions resulting from your actions, or lack thereof.”
I wish more of them would drop the class, since some of them seem to view it as an imposition on their time–and on their habits, for that matter (i.e., my restrictions on eating, drinking, and cell phone use in the classroom).
Boo Hoo, I’m not in college.
I live on the other side of the desk. The one where I expect students to demonstrate an understanding of the required course material in order to pass the course. That they could do it three years ago is of no concern to me.
If the work’s done, it’s done. It shouldn’t have to be re-done from scratch just to satisfy a professor who thinks when someone did something is far, far more important than that they did it. As long as ‘when’ falls before ‘deadline’, who gives a shit how long before?
Yes, like not wasting one’s time repeatedly doing busy work and concentrating instead on material that is actually new.
If my boss asked me to do exactly the same thing twice, you can bet your ass I’m not going to put in the exact same kind of time to appease him. Want a course outline to submit to the department of education so we can get a course approved? Fine. I’ll write one. If you come back two weeks later and ask for the exact same course outline, I’m not fucking starting over from scratch, I’m giving you what I already did.
You have a problem with refusing to re-invent the wheel every term?
Then why the attitude?
And, how, pray tell am I to determine that they did so three years ago? If you did work in a class three years ago, and are now taking a class which requires the same (or similar work), then why are you even taking the course? Never mind, that it’s highly unlikely that two different classes with two different instructors would require the exact same work. And even if one did have some work that was the same, what’s so difficult in making modifications to the work done previously? Most professors wouldn’t have a problem with that. Hell, it’s done all the time in academia (submitting articles to journals, for example). People do it with resumes, for god’s sake.
Who said anything about re-doing something from scratch? Podkayne may require you to spend as much time as other students on a particular assignment, but, really, is this realistic? How is he/she going to know how much time you spend on a particular assignment? Take what you’ve done in the past, modify to the point where it’s noticeably different than the previous work, and be done with it. No one (and I mean no one) is going to spend the time and energy determining whether you’ve spent X many hours working on the assignment. Trust me - time and energy is primarily spent on the obvious plagerism and cheating that takes place.
But more than likely, he isn’t going to ask you for the exact same thing. He’ll want you to make modifications - it could be major or it could be minor. Take what you have, modify to his specifications and be done with it. Same as with a class - more than likely the instructor isn’t going to ask you for the exact same thing. If an assignment is the same (or similar), modify it to the instructors specifications and be done with it.
A-fucking-men ** catsix **. I hate teachers/professors that collect homework for the very same reason. Homework should not be given to assess my ability to perform a task but rather as guidance to what I should practice for the test. If I only need 3 problems to learn something and you assign 10 problems those extra 7 problems are just wasting my time and I might add your time.
catsix, your argument seems to suggest that a college student need only ever write one good research paper on whatever topic for his/her entire academic career. Ya know, since once you’ve done a research paper, you’ve demonstrated that you know how to do one, so why ever do one again? Why not just turn in the same paper over and over again?
The problem with your argument is that rarely (NEVER, cough cough) will an assigned research paper be on the exact same topic twice. You suggested that professors create assignments similar to “recite the alphabet.” Honey, I’m sorry – I dont know what college you dropped out of, of but it sounds like it was the-school-for-remedial-dumbfucks-who-can’t-write-effectively-by-the-time-they-enter-college to me. No wonder you dropped it.
I’m sure you can run into issues of redundancy with the more technical majors, like bioscience or electrical engineering – those schools do have an immutable set of facts that must be learned and regurgitated in order to pronounce an individual “proficient” in that area of learning. Even so, that doesn’t necessitate that a student will be conducting the exact same research on the exact same topic twice for one course, or even across courses. He or she will take the knowledge already learned and expound upon it, thereby gaining more knowledge, having a larger view/grasp of the discipline overall, and becoming a more well-rounded and informed individual. If I were a job scout for Aerospace, would I want to hire the grad student who re-submitted the same papers with the same ideas over and over throughout his tuition? Or would I want the guy that was continually exploring new ideas through expanded research, who was willing to go beyond the bare-bones facts in order to become a more proficient individual? Which of the two do you think would be more likely to exceed at problem-solving? At thinking in new, innovative ways? At bringing something new to my company that our thousands of other employees didn’t already know, since they’re all engineers too and share the same fact-base?
Technical disciplines aside, what about those area of learning where there are no, or very few, definite facts to look up in a book and regurgitate in a paper? How about…oh, I don’t know, ummmmm: Literature? Philosophy? The Arts? Communications? Business? Are you seriously suggesting that an English Lit student need only ever write ONE paper on Shakespeare, because once you’ve done one you must know everything there is to know about Shakespeare’s works?
The MAJOR problem with your entire argument is your assumption that education is a zero-sum game, with a finite amount of information to be learned. The point of higher learning is NOT “Memorize A, B, and C, here’s your diploma, have a nice life.” You’re supposed to extend your knowledge beyond the simple facts, beyond reciting the alphabet. **Turning in the same paper twice is only cheating yourself of the opportunity to expand your mind and better yourself as a person. **
That’s about all I have to rant about on this topic. Podkayne, I’m with you – there’s just nothing more to be said. Catsix, if you still don’t understand our point of view, it’s probably a good thing that you didn’t try to stick out college. Good luck with your asshole boss.
Standard disclaimer: I’m not a professor, I’m a sixth year Lit student and a full-time catalog librarian. My holier-than-thou attitude in this regard stems from my belief that most people attend college to learn something, not just get a diploma/job with minimal effort.