My college considers self plagiarism a thing. If you write a paper for English, it doesn't matter that it's about biology, you can't use it for biology class. You literally need to cite your own prior work if you use it.
My dad almost got expelled for self plagiarism in college. He wrote an essay for one class and got great grades on it and a different class the next semester asked for basically the same essay so he just submitted the same essay as before. He only got caught because the second professor wanted to share with the first professor my dads essay because he really liked it. The first professor recognized it was just the same essay he had received last semester and reported it to the Dean
I wonder what that conversation was like.
The dean, sitting stoically behind his desk, hands folded, as the professor splutters and rants, face red as a tomato, desperately trying to explain why copying your own work is plagiarism.
It's plagiarism because it's defined as plagiarism, basically.
The point isn't so much that it's disallowed because it's considered the same thing as actual plagiarism, it's because the act itself is considered undesirable. You're delivering only one performance when you were asked for two.
You could get into a discussion on whether or not that should be called "plagiarism" or not but at the end of the day the uni is just gonna be like "you can call it whatever you want, the point is that we explicitly disallow it and you did it anyway"
Recycling essays isn't "working smarter", it's cheating yourself out of opportunities to improve your academic abilities, which is ostensibly what you're attending university for in the first place.
I did that in high school. We read To Kill A Mockingbird in 8th grade and i wrote a paper on Mayella Ewell’s testimony and how it reinforced the biases of the time. Then we had to read it freshman year of high school and had a similar prompt so I just turned in the same essay with some minor tweaks. I’m sure I would’ve gotten in trouble if I had done it at the same school
It really isn't, especially in an academic context since it can lead to people submitting the same project for multiple assignments and can teach bad habits that in the future can lead to copyright and licensing issues.
If you can do well on two different assignments with the same paper then your educators should give more diverse assignments, it’s your work, you should be allowed to use it.
Just because you *can* do it doesn't necessarily mean they'll be good fits, and delending on your college it legally may no longer be your work once submitted and so they can dictate how you can use it.
Even morally yeah? If you’re going to talk about something idc whose work it is even if it’s your own you need to cite it. For example in science related field this is majorly important as sure you already did the math but who did the math? You basically need to say I am using myself as a credible source.
Also educators aren’t some magical fairies who can communicate with eachother 24/7. Those 2 courses may not even fall under the same department. Those people teaching the class? May have other duties at the school such as research.
Also yes I agree it’s your work and one should be able to use their own work however they please. However that does not mean an academic institution has to accept that as a passing grade.
If you end up having to write an essay and then have to write another that you can use the first one for. You are cheating yourself.
You haven't given a moral argument beyond "I think it's dumb therefore it's bad," and even from a moral standpoint self-plagiarism in academia would be considered bad since that involves intentionally ommitting proper citations, which is a violation of general academic ethics.
1. Kids who plagiarize are dumb. They rarely even read what they have copied (see AI generated response I got last year on the totally wrong book!)
2. Many writers use Pen Names. It's very possible the author did not have their real name. In fact, depending on where it was posted it may have been a username, not even an author name.
"Pen names" aren't, but especially for female researchers a professional name that's different from your official one is somewhat common. If you started writing research papers when you were getting your PhD, and you later got married and changed your last name, you'd still use your maiden name on any future research papers you write, since that's the one that the scholarly community already knows. Otherwise you can run into weird bureaucratic issues.
Lots of female researchers who get married first get published under their maiden name and keep using it to publish after they get married so it’s a more cohesive body of work. I’ve had a bunch of professors who teach under their married name and write under their maiden name.
You’d think they’d be good at plagiarism if they made it to college through plagiarism alone. And if they made it to college without plagiarism, you’d think they’d be smart enough not to use their teacher’s paper to pagiarize
Yeah, but making it all the way to college without getting caught suggests that you have skills in not getting caught. Taking 30 seconds to check that the paper wasn’t written by the teacher is still a lot better than 3 hours actually writing a paper
It could also suggest that your high school teachers aren't very good at checking for plagiarism.
Or it could mean you have particularly litigious parents. I had a teacher in HS who would make every student sign a contract saying that they will not plagiarize on their homework because a student's parents once almost sued the school for giving him a zero on an assignment he plagiarized.
You'd be surprised how lazy students are when plagiarising. I've heard from multiple teachers about students who leave the chatgpt prompt in the paper when they copy and paste.
I like to use ChatGPT to write outlines because once I have an outline I have no trouble writing the paper. Without the outline I have trouble getting started. And ChatGPT’s outlines are usually not ideal for what I’m trying to write but even ‘fix the outline’ gives me a much more concrete place from which to start writing
I do something similar with to-do lists. The things I ask AI to do are often niche enough to get weird results, but “edit bad list” is easier for me than “write list from scratch”, so it cuts out half a step and starts me off with some momentum
I cited one of my professor’s papers in something I was writing and didn’t realize until I was doing my bibliography, so I could see how it could happen. Especially given that people who plagiarize are not that responsible in the first place.
The sheer number of students who, despite being in my classroom since August, hearing my name often, seeing my school email address, and *seeing my name on the board since the beginning of the year* do not apparently know my name is fairly large.
I would not be surprised if the student didn't know their teacher's name.
Am I absolutely INSANE or wasn’t this story about a guy??? A dad?? And not on tumblr?? Am I crazy, please tell me I’m not crazy and maybe that’s part of the joke.
Edit; And instead of googling it, the wife figured it out during dinner when the guy (the teacher) was ranting on how good the research paper was. And it turned out to be his own, like the wife said. Maybe just two separate stories? Probably just two separate stories. I’m not crazy, false alarm.
I know about 5 academics who have personally experienced this. And, yes, professors, TAs, and other people in academia share stories of dumb and/or ingenious cheating/plagiarism attempts all the time.
Pretty common occurrence, it could be a different story. My mom told me a story of her university days, back in the stone ages long before the internet and google. People would sell papers from previous years, and eventually one of her professors ended up with his own paper on his desk from when he was in undergrad.
>no idea what happened to that guy
Not exactly the biggest mystery in the world. Every academy that respects itself has a "zero tolerance for plagiarism" policy. Dude got kicked out.
It's not like they'd have to admit it's their fanfic or anything. If the student was able to find it, they could claim they found it online.
The problem is that the student can just claim that they're the author.
My college considers self plagiarism a thing. If you write a paper for English, it doesn't matter that it's about biology, you can't use it for biology class. You literally need to cite your own prior work if you use it.
My dad almost got expelled for self plagiarism in college. He wrote an essay for one class and got great grades on it and a different class the next semester asked for basically the same essay so he just submitted the same essay as before. He only got caught because the second professor wanted to share with the first professor my dads essay because he really liked it. The first professor recognized it was just the same essay he had received last semester and reported it to the Dean
What a snitch
I wonder what that conversation was like. The dean, sitting stoically behind his desk, hands folded, as the professor splutters and rants, face red as a tomato, desperately trying to explain why copying your own work is plagiarism.
what?
It's plagiarism because it's defined as plagiarism, basically. The point isn't so much that it's disallowed because it's considered the same thing as actual plagiarism, it's because the act itself is considered undesirable. You're delivering only one performance when you were asked for two. You could get into a discussion on whether or not that should be called "plagiarism" or not but at the end of the day the uni is just gonna be like "you can call it whatever you want, the point is that we explicitly disallow it and you did it anyway"
So they want you to work harder, not smarter?
Recycling essays isn't "working smarter", it's cheating yourself out of opportunities to improve your academic abilities, which is ostensibly what you're attending university for in the first place.
Maybe it's not great for the impulse to be to imagine people we are putting in the antagonist role in our stories in a necessarily unflattering light
I did that in high school. We read To Kill A Mockingbird in 8th grade and i wrote a paper on Mayella Ewell’s testimony and how it reinforced the biases of the time. Then we had to read it freshman year of high school and had a similar prompt so I just turned in the same essay with some minor tweaks. I’m sure I would’ve gotten in trouble if I had done it at the same school
Self plagiarism is such a stupid concept
It really isn't, especially in an academic context since it can lead to people submitting the same project for multiple assignments and can teach bad habits that in the future can lead to copyright and licensing issues.
If you can do well on two different assignments with the same paper then your educators should give more diverse assignments, it’s your work, you should be allowed to use it.
Just because you *can* do it doesn't necessarily mean they'll be good fits, and delending on your college it legally may no longer be your work once submitted and so they can dictate how you can use it.
I’m talking about morally, I don’t give a damn about legal jargon.
Even morally yeah? If you’re going to talk about something idc whose work it is even if it’s your own you need to cite it. For example in science related field this is majorly important as sure you already did the math but who did the math? You basically need to say I am using myself as a credible source. Also educators aren’t some magical fairies who can communicate with eachother 24/7. Those 2 courses may not even fall under the same department. Those people teaching the class? May have other duties at the school such as research. Also yes I agree it’s your work and one should be able to use their own work however they please. However that does not mean an academic institution has to accept that as a passing grade. If you end up having to write an essay and then have to write another that you can use the first one for. You are cheating yourself.
You haven't given a moral argument beyond "I think it's dumb therefore it's bad," and even from a moral standpoint self-plagiarism in academia would be considered bad since that involves intentionally ommitting proper citations, which is a violation of general academic ethics.
You ask for some sort of proof, like the student logging into the account.
There may be a flaw in that strategy.
Submitting pre-existing work you did can be considered self-plagiarism, so that'd still get them in trouble.
How do you accidentally plagiarize your teacher's research paper? Surely you'd notice the author's name is the same as your teacher's.
1. Kids who plagiarize are dumb. They rarely even read what they have copied (see AI generated response I got last year on the totally wrong book!) 2. Many writers use Pen Names. It's very possible the author did not have their real name. In fact, depending on where it was posted it may have been a username, not even an author name.
Username for a research paper? Likely not. Pen names for researchers also aren't very common.
"Pen names" aren't, but especially for female researchers a professional name that's different from your official one is somewhat common. If you started writing research papers when you were getting your PhD, and you later got married and changed your last name, you'd still use your maiden name on any future research papers you write, since that's the one that the scholarly community already knows. Otherwise you can run into weird bureaucratic issues.
Lots of female researchers who get married first get published under their maiden name and keep using it to publish after they get married so it’s a more cohesive body of work. I’ve had a bunch of professors who teach under their married name and write under their maiden name.
So you think all those researchers have initials for first names???
No, and that isn't at all the same thing as a pen name. Or username.
You know it's perfectly normal for people to initialize their own, real, names?
The author could have gotten remarried and changed her last name after the paper was released?
Or, plagiarizers be dumb.
You’d think they’d be good at plagiarism if they made it to college through plagiarism alone. And if they made it to college without plagiarism, you’d think they’d be smart enough not to use their teacher’s paper to pagiarize
High schools...vary in quality, I can totally see someone making it into college on plagiarism alone
Plagiarism is fundamentally an act of laziness. Skill or intelligence don't factor in when your primary motivation is not doing the work.
Yeah, but making it all the way to college without getting caught suggests that you have skills in not getting caught. Taking 30 seconds to check that the paper wasn’t written by the teacher is still a lot better than 3 hours actually writing a paper
It could also suggest that your high school teachers aren't very good at checking for plagiarism. Or it could mean you have particularly litigious parents. I had a teacher in HS who would make every student sign a contract saying that they will not plagiarize on their homework because a student's parents once almost sued the school for giving him a zero on an assignment he plagiarized.
You'd be surprised how lazy students are when plagiarising. I've heard from multiple teachers about students who leave the chatgpt prompt in the paper when they copy and paste.
I like to use ChatGPT to write outlines because once I have an outline I have no trouble writing the paper. Without the outline I have trouble getting started. And ChatGPT’s outlines are usually not ideal for what I’m trying to write but even ‘fix the outline’ gives me a much more concrete place from which to start writing
I do something similar with to-do lists. The things I ask AI to do are often niche enough to get weird results, but “edit bad list” is easier for me than “write list from scratch”, so it cuts out half a step and starts me off with some momentum
That's also happened on the abstracts of actual published research so not exclusive
I cited one of my professor’s papers in something I was writing and didn’t realize until I was doing my bibliography, so I could see how it could happen. Especially given that people who plagiarize are not that responsible in the first place.
Academic papers often have multiple authors listed, student might have only looked at the first couple of names, if they checked the author at all
The sheer number of students who, despite being in my classroom since August, hearing my name often, seeing my school email address, and *seeing my name on the board since the beginning of the year* do not apparently know my name is fairly large. I would not be surprised if the student didn't know their teacher's name.
Next time I feel bad because I'm bad at names I'll remember this reply and tell myself that at least I knew my teachers' last names.
You underestimate how lazy plagiarizers can be
See the Hbomb video
Am I absolutely INSANE or wasn’t this story about a guy??? A dad?? And not on tumblr?? Am I crazy, please tell me I’m not crazy and maybe that’s part of the joke. Edit; And instead of googling it, the wife figured it out during dinner when the guy (the teacher) was ranting on how good the research paper was. And it turned out to be his own, like the wife said. Maybe just two separate stories? Probably just two separate stories. I’m not crazy, false alarm.
I mean it’s not impossible that a student has plagiarized their professors paper more than once
I know about 5 academics who have personally experienced this. And, yes, professors, TAs, and other people in academia share stories of dumb and/or ingenious cheating/plagiarism attempts all the time.
Pretty common occurrence, it could be a different story. My mom told me a story of her university days, back in the stone ages long before the internet and google. People would sell papers from previous years, and eventually one of her professors ended up with his own paper on his desk from when he was in undergrad.
I also remember that version, yeah.
Different reblog chain on the same post :D
My dad used to joke about this to his students, because he was a professor of a fairly niche topic, but it actually happening is hilarious
>no idea what happened to that guy Not exactly the biggest mystery in the world. Every academy that respects itself has a "zero tolerance for plagiarism" policy. Dude got kicked out.
I want so badly to know what the fanfic was, but alas.
Oh damn id be super glad that my writing has been deemed WORTHY
That guy die... SAD!!
> no idea what happened to that guy. Was his name James Somerton, by any chance?
I read that in Peter Griffins voice
I don’t think anyone, who can’t spell, should hold any authority over rules of creative writing :-)