Plagiarizing Yourself - Advice - The Chronicle of Higher Education - 31 views
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Her presentation contained a slide that said academic dishonesty included plagiarizing yourself—i.e., taking a paper you had written for one course and turning it in for credit in another course. That, she explained, constituted a dishonest representation of your work for a course. "Unless," one of my colleagues chimed in at that point, "you're an academic, and you're presenting the same idea at a bunch of different conferences. Then it's clearly not dishonest."
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"Are we allowed to use ideas from our writing exercise to help us write this paper?" she asked. "Of course," I said. "That was the whole point of the writing exercise—to get you a head start in thinking about how you want to approach your paper." "OK," she said. And then after a brief pause: "Because at orientation they told us we weren't allowed to use our own work twice." "Ah," I said. "That doesn't really apply in this case. And anyway, I don't really mind, in this course, if you take a paper that you've written for another course and revise it for an assignment in here. You just have to make sure that what you turn in fulfills my specific assignment. Other professors might feel differently, though. So I would always ask before you tried to do that."
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So does the injunction against plagiarizing from yourself fall into the category of one of those hypocritical rules that we like to impose on our children: Drinking soda every day would be bad for your health, honey, but it's fine for me? If a categorical difference exists here between what we do and what we forbid our students to do, I confess, I have a hard time seeing it.
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So why deprive our students of the opportunity to learn those same lessons, by recycling a particular paper from one course to the next?
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I can foresee one more objection: What's to prevent a student from recycling the same paper from course to course to course? Students who did so would lose the valuable opportunity to practice their writing—and writing, like any other intellectual or physical skill, requires lots of practice. But—practically speaking—the opportunity to reuse a paper might arise only once or twice in a student's career, thanks to the diversity of our course assignments and disciplines.
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First, do you see a problem with allowing students to revise a paper or presentation created for one course and turn it in for another one, assuming they can make it fit the assignment for the new course? Does this count as plagiarism? Second, are there any courses or programs that build such a process into the curriculum—requiring or encouraging students to take work from one course and adapt it for another? I encourage readers to offer their ideas. Of course if you have published or presented elsewhere on this subject, you should still go ahead and share your recycled idea. I will leave it up to you to decide whether to feel guilty about that.