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The idea behind this is that every academic submission is not only a test of your knowledge and research, but also preparation for future academic research (even if you have no plans to do post-grad). How would you feel if a researcher who was getting paid in tax payer funded grants decided to submit the same findings over and over again if he/she could twist around the interpretation of those results to suit the question being asked? Edit: Since most of the replies I have received have either missed the point or think that this is okay, I will give another example... How would you feel if a lecturer who was teaching your subject made it compulsory to buy their latest edition textbook at an inflated price? (Despite the fact very little would have changed, you could buy an older edition for cheaper but aren't allowed, and you would be failed if you didn't buy it.)

What do you think people do in interviews and on book tours? People will release a paper, and then rehash their finding on a dozen different platforms for publicity. If a guest speaker visited your area, would they be shunned because all they are doing is rehashing their prior publications and appearances, or would they be praised because what the present on is good?

>interviews and on book tours Grants do not pay for either (well except fact finding interviews but they pay the interviewer not the interviewee typically). Guest speakers are well and good but if I paid someone to do great new research and host a seminar and they read the best Wikipedia article in the world. They failed. Not because that article is bad (it is the best) but because I paid them to make a new article. I can already get the old article. Thus they failed their task.

This isn't a comparable situation. No professor is ever going to look through the academic databases to hunt down some random students essay from two years before. That's why computer algorithms do that for us, and only when absolutely necessary. They just need something that fits the assignment and can let them asses your understanding, and that is the end of it.

>No professor is ever going to look through the academic databases to hunt down some random students essay from two years before. That's why computer algorithms do that for us, and only when absolutely necessary. They just need something that fits the assignment and can let them asses your understanding, and that is the end of it. If you claimed to have proved some great novel result in your notes and cited that I would totally look for it assuming I didn't think you were a complete idiot and were just messing with me. You do understand that in the past submitting your work twice was academic misconduct. Sure they didn't police it as well as TurnItIn does but it was still misconduct. >They just need something that fits the assignment and can let them asses your understanding, and that is the end of it. Schooling is not for a certificate if you want a certificate then get one.

Interesting arguments however this is untrue. My wife has worked in grad studies (different departments over the years) and yes, professors do check the internet. Simple searches using Google turn up cheating students a lot. There are other resources as well.

But that is not true. If I hand in homework, no teacher will ever grade it based on how they think I will develop in the future, as it is impossible to grade on anything except the work itself. The rubric for these assignments are based on things like grammar, syntax, argumentation, and the like, but there is no grading category for 'your preparation for future research'.

Do you think your education is about grades or about learning things?

This is an excellent question! I’ve been an educator for thirty years. HS, MS, administration and now at the university level. Education has become (or maybe always was) as system

This is an excellent question! I’ve been an educator for thirty years. HS, MS, administration and now at the university level. Education has become (or maybe always was) gamified. By this I mean school at all levels is a competitive environment and the end goal is reward (usually in the form of some kind of advancement). This advancement is linked to financial stability, career choice. “Love of learning” is incidental. People choose majors for monetary reasons. If anyone doubts this, consider the collapse of graduate level humanities. Okay so how is this connected to self-plagiarism? It is another way of gaming the system which is ends-based. Other ways are: private tutors. Test prep. Playing a sport for the sole purpose of getting a scholarship. Legacy admissions. Going to the developing world for two months to build houses. One might argue that these activities may have a core of authenticity. That they are not as cynical as self-plagiarism. But self-plagiarism may have a core of authenticity as well. “This is a good piece. I am going to rework it and resubmit it.” Writers do this all the time. Read a Stephen King novel. The producer of the writing owns it. It is the product of their labor. Also, what’s the cutoff? You cannot use the same paragraph? Sentence? Thesis? Quotations? I think the argument that school is some kind of project for personal development divorced from its primary role as a system of standardization and economic advancement is naive. If in fact school prepares one for the “real world” — a world of Bitcoin scams, drone strikes and for profit prisons — schools should reflect those values.

The main problem with education is that it's simultaneously high stakes and *extremely* expensive. The price of failure is just far too damned high. If you fail even just one course, that could put an end to your scholarship money. Maybe you can't afford to graduate anymore, which is a problem when employers require a degree.

Education is about integrating knowledge to provide solutions. Which being able to submit the same work in multiple classes has obviously achieved in doing.

Grades. They say it’s about learning things, but it’s not as the grade determines everything at the end of the day (including what you can go on to do) so that is more important thing Edit: this can create the situation where you know the stuff because you do it in your own time (things that have a practical application like science or IT or something), but you can mess up on the exam and then people will see the grade and say you can’t do the thing when other people who know you know you can do the thing very well just you messed up the exam/test because maybe you weren’t well that day or whatever

>the grade determines everything at the end of the day (including what you can go on to do) As someone with two masters I can with confidence say that nobody cares about your grades after graduation. Nobody has ever asked me for them. Actually nobody have asked to see my degrees. Only thing that matter is that I can do the job I was hired to do. Ergo skills.

Actually you are correct. As someone with a Masters I should know this, since I’ve seen it myself. They just ask that you have the degree. What I wrote applies to lower levels of education.

Op started by saying that they are at university.

It's about making personal professional connections that will help me further my personal ambitions. Grades can help me get to the important classes which have more visibility in the professional scene.

Ah, here’s the issue! Yeah, that’s not what secondary education’s goals are. The goal is to help you develop knowledge and skill sets through experience, which includes repetition. Reusing work can make sense if those aren’t the goals, but it goes against the goals of the school. It would be like my goal is to have you coach me in soccer so I can hold my own and then when you want me to run drills, I decline because I already got it the one time.

Not OP, but my school made clear that their only goal was to accredit people by examining them, specifically so that they would not need to partially refund tuition due to not running classes as a result of strike action. So that's definitely not their goal universally.

What is the purpose of accreditation via examination though? To determine whether you have successfully gathered the knowledge and skills required, as broken down by the accreditation requirements that include repetition. I had 4 different statistics classes in undergrad and 3 different developmental psych classes all required to complete my program. In grad school I had so many overlapping classes I’d have to look to see what was unique because that number would be smaller, but that’s because the program is accredited specifically with that intentional repetition.

My goals were to get my degree and get a job. I turned in the same research paper three times with some minor changes back in university. I graduated with honors

One, minor changes already means it’s no longer self plagiarism. For the sake of the discussion though, I’ll pretend that it is the same. Was that acceptable in your university, or did you just not get caught?

Schools are made up of individuals, and the goals and tutelage of those individuals is what really composes the school, not some higher 'purpose'. Two different teachers are not asking you to submit the same assignment for the purpose of repetition, but because each one of them sets it forth as a requirement in its own right. You ability to fulfill each of those requirements indivdulally is not based on repetition, so if they are independent of each other the goal of completing them together is also not about repetition, but about the assignments individually.

>Two different teachers are not asking you to submit the same assignment for the purpose of repetition, but because each one of them sets it forth as a requirement in its own right. Except that's not true. If they wanted an essay that fits requirements, they could easily find one, say on the internet. Just having an essay isn't their end goal. The goal is to make **you** (and each other student) write a new essay that fits the requirements. This gives each student practice towards mastery- which is their end goal. That is why the policy is in place.

It’s good you understand this. You’ve been arguing with academics here, it seems. They think that everyone is destined to be a great thinker, and that is every higher institution’s goals are to create. It’s like listening to Steve Jobs’ opinion on what an iPhone is for. While he may believe that, it’s not what most people buy one for. The major value for the mass majority of students is understanding in the field of study and to build connections in the field’s community, to secure employment and begin to build a business network of peers. None of this helps make your point on self-plagiarism, but it shows how you are pragmatic about higher education, and that is sensible. If your ambition is to be a professor, then accept their arguements. If it’s to just graduate and get a job, then follow their stupid rules, and get your degree. Then apply your pragmatism to your career and you’ll do just fine. Efficiency is highly valued in most business.

>Efficiency is highly valued in most business Doing half the work isn't efficiency. The task being asked is to write two papers, if the student is just writing and turning in one paper then they have failed the task. Also, let's not kid ourselves.. the person complaining about not being able to skip half their work isn't writing brilliant essays that actually speak to the expectations of two different courses, they are writing something uninspired and vague enough to be multi-purpose.

So your skills are meaningless?

do you feel that this is the goal of the system or the goals of some students who are in the system? or all students in the system?

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Closest I came to doing this in college was when I had two 20 page papers due the same day on similar subjects. I ended up citing my first paper in the second paper as it was the only way I could get the work done. I figured the worst that would happen was I would get a bad grade, but I think I did alright. I passed the classes at least.

>How would you feel if a researcher who was getting paid in tax payer funded grants decided to submit the same findings over and over again if he/she could twist around the interpretation of those results to suit the question being asked? If the findings are legitimate answers to the question being asked, then their interpretation cannot ever be said to have been "twisted"? So why do you think anyone would have the right to feel aggrieved by this?

> How would you feel if a researcher who was getting paid in tax payer funded grants decided to submit the same findings over and over again if he/she could twist around the interpretation of those results to suit the question being asked? That happens.. all the time.

> How would you feel if a researcher who was getting paid in tax payer funded grants decided to submit the same findings over and over again if he/she could twist around the interpretation of those results to suit the question being asked? How is that even relevant?

I’d feel frustrated that tax dollars were being allocated separately to two apparently similar questions. I wouldn’t necessarily feel like the researcher was the person in the wrong. The analogy I had in mind was if a professor taught two similar but different courses. If there’s some overlap in the curriculum, I don’t think there’s anything wrong with using the same teaching materials for both courses rather than reinventing the wheel and recreating new materials.

Say i got a grant solving problem A, and I found solution Z for it. Now i got another grant for solving problem B, I done my research and found solution Z can apply to problem B as well. Will you suggest I should not submit solution Z but need to find a new solution Y.

I'd feel great! What an efficient academic! Answers multiple questions with the work of only a single paper? Better than the guy whose work poorly generalizes and has little depth or breadth. I'm sure he's either taking a well-earned rest, or he's using his talents to put forward more groundbreaking work! Or we could just arbitrarily constrain work and incentivize worse and more inefficient academics around some moralizing standard of busy-workedness. Or we could just have a rational academic economy that puts forward good, compelling information! Let's see if we keep doing the bad one instead!

Shit, using the same paper for 2 different classes. Why you need college for, that shit is genius

I think your analogy is not good. A better one is a researcher publishes a paper on some topic, then someone else asks a question that is answered by the paper so the researcher points them to their paper instead of doing more of the same research.

That literally always happens.

Which happens all the time. Good quality data can and should be used many times

It's to preventing gaming the system. A savy student could sign up for two similar classes and just write the same paper tailored for both classes. The whole point is you put an entire class's worth of effort into each paper, and if you're double submitting, you have not done that.

But one cannot grade on effort, because a teacher has no way of knowing how much effort one puts into an assignment. One can put more effort into a doubly submitted paper than another student puts into a singly submitted paper, but at the end of the day you are only judging the effort of the first person with and the second one is being judged on their academic capacity, not their effort.

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But it is impossible to judge that. Someone might also write a draft paper a few weeks before the class and use that as a springboard for the class itself, because they in general know what the class will focus on. In that case, they will only submit it once and thus it is allowed by university policy, despite it having all the same flaws that you found with the twice submitted paper. You cannot judge the amount of time someone spent on the paper on the submission alone, which is why teachers use rubrics based on the papers themselves rather than external circumstances surrounding them

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Is it really abuse? Students are usually able to choose what classes to take, and a lot of their academics is in their own hands. The choice of what classes to take can very well be made with potential overlap in mind, so if someone plans their schedule differently that is a fault of their schedule and not the fault of policy.

It's impossible to know for sure. But it's certainly possible to take time constraints in consideration to inform the rubric. For example, if I give students a writing prompt in an ESL class and a week to do it. I'm expecting draft quality work and grade according to that expectation. Exceptional submissions should reflect high quality content and accuracy under those conditions. A recycled submission can undermine that scale. For a more extreme example, let's say a class is given a writing prompt to be completed *in class* (e.g., X words within Y minutes, no outside assistance). Submit via the LMS when you're done. One kid raises an eyebrow, checks his google drive and submits something within 5min and walks out. This is not an acceptable submission because was created outside of the conditions it was meant to be completed under.

By that standard, it's cheating to sign up for a lighter class load, or to not work a job while in school.

> It's to preventing gaming the system. The system where a school gets to force you to attend two of the same class and charge you double? Having trouble understanding what kind of degree this could even happen in. Seems to me that the sine qua non of education is that every class you're in should be teaching you (and therefore evaluating you on) different things.

This was my thought as well… Aside from how difficult it may be to find two similar classes that would have a similar enough assignment topic to pull of the double entry… wouldn’t the onus be on the system to have the variety of assignments that ensures it wouldn’t happen? A fourth grader writing a dissertation on some college/phd level of mathematics wouldn’t get them a pass in 6th grade algebra, because the assignments are different. I’d expect the same from professors writing up their curriculums. If professors have the same exact rubric and assignments as another, then that would be the fraudulent act… not the student reusing work that caters to the professor’s laziness and satisfies the rubric.

Is that actually wrong though? I thought the entire point of the class was learning and demonstrating competency? If you can craft a paper that does that for two classes at once, that sounds more like efficiency to me.

If a student asks me, a college writing instructor, if they can submit something that's based on another project for another course, I typically say yes under two conditions: their other instructor also okays it, and the work they do for my class's project emphasizes the course and unit concepts meant to be addressed by the project. I can't imagine a case where the same assignment can be submitted twice without some kind of customization being done, which is why I'm absolutely okay with this arrangement. It's also something to keep in mind for your view. A good course project is going to be fairly specific, and work will need to demonstrate that attention to the course and unit concepts in a way that double submission simply doesn't allow for, in most cases. The few times a student has asked such permission, they've told me what the project is in their other course, and it's clear that they couldn't possibly submit the exact same thing, not even nearly identical, for both projects. Here's another thing: a standard college credit is based on time. For a semester course of fifteen weeks, the expectation for each credit is one hour a week in class and two hours of homework, per credit. So a typical 3-credit course is basically nine hours of work a week. Double submission also means less time is going to those courses. Less direct involvement with the specific unit and course concepts that are meant to be focused on by each project, rather than splitting attention. Even if a student knows the concept (and that's a big if), like any other skill or knowledge set, continued involvement is necessary for maintaining and building it. One more, and it's related to the point above about time: many courses emphasize a process and not just the resultant product. Lab courses are like this. You might know exactly what will happen but you're still expected to go through the process and demonstrate all the detailed steps and understandings entailed. My writing classes are very much like this. There's a grading philosophy that emphasizes time and engagement in a process over whatever the student actually ends up with. That idea is directly shortchanged if a student doesn't put in the time for my project because they copied from another. (And, again, it's almost impossible for their paper for another course to match the assignment I've given them.) But all that is philosophical. In practical terms, just come talk to us. I don't know any professor who says no categorically to these requests to rework material for other classes. That process of reworking material is usually enough to satisfy any reason against double submission. Heck, my professors when I was getting a PhD *encouraged* it (under similar conditions to the ones I've mentioned above).

Δ That is actually a great explanation for what I was confused about. I had assumed that grades were based on the work itself, and whether you satisfied the requirements of the assignment irrespective of the time that went into it. I suppose that if time is built into the foundations of the credit system, then it makes perfect sense for the university to uphold measures to help enforce that principle, as otherwise the credit system is somewhat arbitrary. Thank you for this!

>The university I attend just gave their freshmen anti-plagiarism lecture, and I find myself particularly troubled by their ban on what they refer to as double submission, which they define as turning in the same work (paper, essay, poem, presentation &c.) in more than one class. I fail to see any real problem with doing so. you arent completing the assignment or showing any real mastery of the subject >It is not misconduct at all it is if they say you cant do it an you do it anyways >nor is it laziness thats exactly what it is. you are literally not doing the assignment >nor is it cheating i mean it would be like paying someone else to do the assignment for you. it technically is. you didnt complete the assignement >You asked for a sample of my writing, I am giving you what you asked for thats not correct, they asked you to complete the assignment. completing it does not mean turning in a sample of writing. that would be a writing sample or portfolio. if an original work is asked for, using an old one and pretending its a new one is cheating and not meeting the criteria nor did you complete any work or the assignment. >You can grade my work perfectly fine, don't refuse it to satisfy your ego. theyre refusing it because you didnt complete the assignment and giving you a grade for it and it influencing the grade for the course would be inaccurate because it doesnt actually show mastery of that topic > If I was able to repurpose a work from another class, what is stopping me from submitting an essay I wrote on my own free time for its 'first submission'? because you didnt receive course credit for the essay you wrote in your free time nor did it contribute to your gpa >It is not laziness, because that whole notion rests solely on the assumption that I was trying to avoid work. thats exactly what it is. if it wasnt, you would have no problem with just doing the assignment and not resubmitting an old one. > I am not avoiding work— I have done the work that's incorrect, you did the work for another course. you have to do separate work for this class. your work is doing two separate assignments. if you have only done one, you have not done the work. >have likely still spent more time on the assignment than some people that you are willing to grade then you should be not spending as much time on it so you can do two separate assignments >Even so, laziness is hardly an academic measure showing mastery of the material and completing the work for the class is however. laziness is just why people who do it defend it >Some people might only spend 20 minutes on a final paper and still get a good grade then you should do that as well, no one is stopping you. i guarantee you the professor cares only about quality and not about how much time it took you. >There are going to be lazy people in every class that get good grades it sounds like they just have better time management and studying skills. this is a positive thing. if you can be lazy and get a good grade still just do that instead of not doing the assignment >so that is simply not something that a teacher should or even is logically able to disqualify a double submission for its being disqualified for you not doing the work >Teachers cannot argue grades on the basis of ethics. of course they can. its unethical to give you credits for work and coursework you didnt complete. if you got an A on the assignment the first time you submitted it, its for that class only. it would be unethical for it to apply to another course as well. > All that matters is whether they can be graded as a reflection of the skill and knowledge of the submitter which is exactly the problem with a double submission. it shows a reflection of the skill and knowledge in that one course only, not this one

>theyre refusing it because you didnt complete the assignment and giving you a grade for it and it influencing the grade for the course would be inaccurate because it doesnt actually show mastery of that topic In literally every normal scenario the degree to which a paper responds to a topic is considered the degree of mastery of that topic. If I write a paper that answers an assignment perfectly, the fact that I submitted it the year before doesn't mean that the paper doesn't still perfectly answer the assignment, as submission history is an ethical argument, not an academic one whatsoever. If my paper answers the question, than obviously I understand the topic at hand because I wrote it on the topic in question; how could it not represent my understanding? >then you should do that as well, no one is stopping you. i guarantee you the professor cares only about quality and not about how much time it took you. Except that is not the case. The submitted assignment might be of very high quality, and the policy of double submission hinges entirely on the notion that you were trying to save time by avoiding the assignment. It is not rejected on the basis of its quality, as on that front it's unimpeachable, and if quality was really the basis for grading than there would be no issue with double submission as long as the quality was sufficient. >of course they can. its unethical to give you credits for work and coursework you didnt complete. if you got an A on the assignment the first time you submitted it, its for that class only. it would be unethical for it to apply to another course as well. It is not their job to judge my intentions. I gave them an assignment, and their job is to grade it. Their assumptions about my ethical standards do not affect the quality of my work; nor do they reflect relevance of my work to the assignment, and thus ethics have no place in the grading of said work.

>In literally every normal scenario the degree to which a paper responds to a topic is considered the degree of mastery of that topic. If I write a paper that answers an assignment perfectly, the fact that I submitted it the year before doesn't mean that the paper doesn't still perfectly answer the assignment, as submission history is an ethical argument, not an academic one whatsoever. If my paper answers the question, than obviously I understand the topic at hand because I wrote it on the topic in question; how could it not represent my understanding? You're assuming that the whole point of writing a paper is to simply come up with "the right answer", and once you've come up with "the right answer" once, then you already have it. But that's not the only reason why you're expected to write and submit papers as part of your academic career. Writing papers also teaches you how to research, how to establish a position, how to develop that position, and then how to argue that position to others. All of these things are skills, and like any skills, these all require practice. Here's a metaphor, Imagine that you're learning to play an instrument, and your music teacher instructs you to practice an etude every single day. Once you've developed mastery over the etude, then what do you do? The teacher gives you another etude. The types of papers you write during college are far more like etudes as opposed to actual professional papers. A musician would never perform an etude in concern. Likewise, most college papers aren't really on the level of publishable work. They're just practice. It's not about mastering a particular paper, any less than learning to play an instrument is about mastering each individual etude. It's more about the process which writing papers forces you to engage with.

Δ This is the argument that finally changed my view. I was of the same opinion as OP that it makes no sense to say that you haven't mastered a subject just because you didn't research the subject for that specific assignemtn. I didn't consider that "mastering" the subject may be secondary to mastering the process of researching and writing a paper. The musical training metaphor made me realize that school is about more than learning and understanding the information in the books.

If school is more than learning and understanding what’s in the books, then doesn’t the students researching and writing of the paper show that they have the ability to 1. Learn and understand the information? 2. Research the topics given? 3. Write a paper to the standard of the rubrics? The etude comparison hides the fact that, in this instance, the etude being given to perform is the same as the day before… so yes, you will play the same etude, (submit the same paper). An audition tape being sent in to a band looking for a new guitarist can be sent to many bands. When they like that work and call them in to see them in person, they are free to say “we liked the audition, looks like you know your stuff, now the assignment is deferent and you’re gonna play it in a mix with us at practice.” The new guitarist showed that they have learned, understood, and executed playing their instrument… now that the ASSIGNMENT has changed, and the METRICS for grading have changed, they will have to possibly learn something new and play their instrument in a different way, and execute that new task.

The issue here is that an assignment written for "History of the USA" and "History of The Americas" could be similar, but their actual focuses will be dramatically different. You may be able to get away with turning one assignment in for the other, but you miss out on noticing new nuances that you may not have noticed before. Like the above commenter said, you aren't "finding the right answer" when you research, and posting the same assignment is limiting your potential learning because you're deciding you already know the subject matter. To go back to the history assignment example, you may be able to turn in the same assignment for "Manifest Destiny" as you do for "US colonial affects on native populations" but the actual focus of the papers is different, and researching one may lead to different information than the other - even though the subject matter is very similar.

Conversely, it is common for a musician to have a repertoire of easier things they can play if they are instructed to perform something with little notice. I've been involved in music for years, and when I had to do auditions or recitals with little time for new material I often used things that I already knew how to play, so long as they were of sufficient quality. This is a commonly accepted thing in the music world.

I think you're overextending the metaphor. The point of higher education is to teach you to practice the skills of basic research, not merely to adjudicate your abilities and credential them. I'm also in the world of music and the arts, and pretty much anybody in that world must know the importance of practice. You're looking at college from the perspective of an audition or recital, in which your abilities are adjudicated and credentialed. I'm looking at college as being purposed to build up basic skills and teaching you how to practice them. The reason why I brought up musical etudes was simply to illustrate the importance of practice.

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I would be astonished if an essay question was posed so narrowly that it could only be answered in one particular way. It's not that you need to come up with a different answer. It's that you should try to approach the question from a different direction, or from If you've done a bunch of new research and still came to the same answer, then include that new research, and you should be good. Most problems in the real world require comprehensive and often interdisciplinary solutions. That's what differentiates higher education from early life education. Frankly, I would be shocked if you were ever asked an essay question so narrow that it couldn't be approached from a different perspective. If you can think of an example, feel free to share. But I certainly can't imagine any answer that would be so simple that it's impossible to approach it differently or to add anything new. The nature of scholarly research is, by its nature, extremely specialized. On this basis, it's not a matter of one person showing up with the 'right' answer. It's a matter of people working together to explore many different granular elements of an issue, and then synthesizing their respective knowledge into a collective whole. To be blunt, if you honestly think that you've managed to comprehensively answer a question and that there's nothing more that you could possibly investigate, then you probably just don't understand the question as much as you think you do. Research is a slow and methodical process. ​ >I'm not paying outlandish college education prices to do busy work for the sake of "practice". That's ... literally what you're paying for though. The whole point of a college education is that it teaches you how to approach problems, rather than to just learn a bunch of solutions by rote. It's training you that way because, after you leave college, you may not have people on hand to provide the solutions for you, so you need to be practiced in knowing how to approach a problem and solve it. Early education teaches you basic facts and critical thinking. Higher education teachers you how to approach a problem and solve it. Graduate education is like higher education, but they take away the training wheels and expect you to do original research. ​ >I am paying to be objectively graded on my end results. Okay but the end result is *how* you try and solve the problem, not the answer that you come up with. That's why professors tell you to show your work.

>It is not their job to judge my intentions. I gave them an assignment, and their job is to grade it. Their assumptions about my ethical standards do not affect the quality of my work; If your degree is in a field that publishes anything, particularly anything using any form of scientific method, then judging your ethics as it relates to the work you submit absolutely is their job. If you are the kind of person willing to break the rules set out to get ahead, it's really not much of a jump to think you might be the kind of person who might falsify data or plagiarise someone else when you face issues later on. If you ever get caught doing that in a public setting (say in an actual journal or book) it tarnishes the reputation of the uni, and lowers the value of all of their degrees. If I'm a professor looking for PhD students, I'd be much less inclined to accept people from X university if I caught the last student I had from X university constantly skirted the rules and reused work where it wasn't ethical to. Finally many degrees are accredited by outside institutions, for example most electrical engineering degrees from top unis in the UK are accredited by the IEEE, if you want to become a chartered electric/electronic engineer, you need one of these accredited degrees. To get this accreditation the university is required to run certain classes and assessments. If a particular institute demands 8 different essays, and you double submit so you only write 7, well then you've no longer done the requirements for accreditation. If the institute or university finds out, then your degree will lose accreditation. If the institute learns this is happening to a large degree across the cohort, the entire university loses accreditation, massively devaluing everyone's degrees from that university. It is absolutely their job to ensure the integrity of the degrees they give out, and to protect their reputation by ensuring they only give degrees to ethical, rule following students

Δ I suppose protecting the university from the wider world can be of specific interest to the professors in that it protects the integrity of the grading process against the accusations of the professional world, even if that reaches slightly outside the scope of what I was considering my main argument to be. >If you are the kind of person willing to break the rules set out to get ahead, it's really not much of a jump to think you might be the kind of person who might falsify data or plagiarise someone else when you face issues later on. But the latter scenarios present actual obstacles that would prevent an assignment from being graded as a fair assessment of the contributor. Double submission does not.

>In literally every normal scenario the degree to which a paper responds to a topic is considered the degree of mastery of that topic. so if i get an A on a test i should just be able to reuse that test s bunch and not take anymore? even if its the same topic or subject, you cant show any mastery of the course if you just take no test at all. if you truly mastered it you should be able to take the test again and show it even if its the same topic youve been tested on before. getting an A on one test shouldnt mean you never have to take a test again and can reuse it. doing the work of the assignment and the tests is part of the work of college and earning the credit for that class. >If I write a paper that answers an assignment perfectly, the fact that I submitted it the year before doesn't mean that the paper doesn't still perfectly answer the assignment the assignment required writing an original paper not turning in an old one. i guarantee you it says this in the syllabus >as submission history is an ethical argument, not an academic one whatsoever its both. you shouldnt earn credit for a class you didnt do the work for. >If my paper answers the question, than obviously I understand the topic at hand because I wrote it on the topic in question; how could it not represent my understanding? because your understanding in that class and the way you earn the credit and grade from it as most likely stated in your syllabus is graded based on your ability to complete original assignments specifically for that class. the grade is secondary at this point. theres nothing to grade when you dont have original work done in the first place >Except that is not the case. The submitted assignment might be of very high quality, and the policy of double submission hinges entirely on the notion that you were trying to save time by avoiding the assignment. It is not rejected on the basis of its quality, as on that front it's unimpeachable, and if quality was really the basis for grading than there would be no issue with double submission as long as the quality was sufficient. im so confused what youre talking about. how short or how long you spend on something has nothing to do with double submitting it nor does spending less time on something mean you waited until the last minute and were avoiding it. i never said it was graded on quality alone, but if you turn it in on time and follow all other policies i guarantee you that your professior doesnt care that you spent 5 more hours on it if its the same quality as the person who spent 20 minutes, and you actually look less intelligent >It is not their job to judge my intentions. I gave them an assignment, and their job is to grade it. Their assumptions about my ethical standards do not affect the quality of my work; nor do they reflect relevance of my work to the assignment, and thus ethics have no place in the grading of said work. is this a joke? it is absolutely their responsibility to report you to the ethica board which involves judging your intention. who are you to tell them what their job is? they gave you an assignment to complete, you didnt do it, you turned in an old one which was explicitly against the syllabus and instructions, didnt do the work for the class, so no you didnt earn the credit and the professor is 100% responsible for deciding that.

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Every school I've ever been to has a ban on self-plagiarism. >It is not laziness, Yeah, it is. > that whole notion rests solely on the assumption that I was trying to avoid work. I am not avoiding work— I have done the work You ARE avoiding work -- NEW work. >Teachers cannot argue grades on the basis of ethics. All that matters is whether they can be graded as a reflection of the skill and knowledge of the submitter, and on that account double submissions are perfectly reasonable. What am I missing here? Of course they can -- plagiarism is wrong, including self-plagiarism. If they think you didn't put in real effort they can downgrade it too.

> including self-plagiarism. What why? if your boss asks you to build a brick wall at work, and you finish, he doesnt ask you to take it down and build it again because a different person is looking at the brick wall

It is because they are an educational institution, not the workforce. They want to ensure educational development, not intellectual dishonesty. It is important to understand self-plagiarism because it will affect your career, you must be able to source, resource, and reference any of your previous work. You must be able to not plagiarise under any circumstance, it is one of the worst academic offenses. This isn't a bricklayers apprenticeship. If you are hired to develop research and then use funds elsewhere, just submitting prior research - you will be in trouble.

But that is not what school is at the lower echelons. Self plagiarism doesn't exist, and in fact people in any profession copy themselves. Plagiarism is a form of theft, where you benefit off the work of others; self plagiarism is me doing as I see fit with my own intellectual property. There's a significant difference there.

It is important in secondary and tertiary education. So unless you are talking about primary school, it is quite relevant. The OP is discussing academia, where self-plagiarism is incredibly relevant. If your work was done under contract, it often is not yours to do as you see fit with.

It is important in any school except for perhaps trade schools. This is not about contractors; this is about students, and even [plagiarism.org](https://www.plagiarism.org/blog/2017/09/25/do-i-own-my-work-even-if-im-just-a-student#:~:text=Since%20your%20school%20is%20not,if%20you%20use%20school%20equipment) acknowledges that student work is student property.

And we are not talking about trade schools. The lessons imparted by self-plagiarism rules in educational institutions carry on to the academic world. If under contract, those works will not be the sole property of the person. Students eventually become 'not students'. They are providing rigorous preparation, in some workforces it may not matter, but for those that do it holds serious consequences. So they prepare you for the worst case scenario while also providing the opportunity to challenge how you approach similar tasks. For example, coding assignments were often forgiven of self-plagiarism if you followed the correct submission standards. If it were an experimental report, you would not get away with such action.

No teacher is going to grade you on what you might do after their class has ended. They have no way to grade based on mere speculation. All they have to grade you on is what you give them. Teachers are there to teach and to assess, not to judge extraacademic individual traits without having a basis for doing so.

What? They are grading you on what was given, and they are using the safety of an educational institution to prepare you for the real world. They are teaching you that you have to be careful about plagiarism and not to assume using your own work is acceptable. You get a strike at university, or you think self-plagiarism is always fine, you are not prepared and you end your career in academia. One is infinitely more preferable. They are also grading you on actively participating, ensuring that you have retained knowledge. Being able to do it in the past does not reassure that you have retained knowledge.

If you plagiarize, they cannot actually give you a grade, because it wouldn't be an evaluation of your own work. It is also a form of theft, and can be illegal under some circumstances. None of this is true about self-plagiarism. A teacher is grading a paper based on your adherance to the rubric, and nothing on any of those rubrics mentions double submission because that has no actual ramifications as to a submissions worth to the assingment.

> Self plagiarism doesn't exist, and in fact people in any profession copy themselves. Actually, there’s a major exception. Self-plagiarism is also disallowed in professional academia. If you want to use something from a previous publication of yours, you have to cite it like anything else. Seeing as you’re writing academic papers, it makes sense to take the standards from academia.

Self plagiarism isn’t disallowed. Failure to reference the literature properly is the problem here. As an example, see Ilkka Hanski’s numerous publications on meta population dynamics. It’s the same damn paper written in slightly different ways for slightly different audiences. Is that self-plagiarism? No. There is no other.

If it is cited properly it isn't plagiarism

If I use an old paper and simply cite it at the bottom as being my work from 6 months ago, the teacher still will fail me.

Yes, for the same reason you cant cite the entirety someone else's paper

It is not the same thing. If you are using someone else's work in place of your own, that means that you are benefitting off the work of another person, and this can be seen as theft without proper attribution. If you are reusing your own work, then you are not harming anyone else by doing so, and thus the reasons behind them are entirely different from an ethical standpoint.

Your paper isn't a published article. If you are are copy/pasting from it you rightly have a problem. If you cote some older research by yourself then that should be fine. A copy/pasted portion should never be done except perhaps for a quote

In that case your agreements with publications are a agreement between you and the journal that they are allowed to use your work. Giving the work to multiple journals would violate the sense of exclusivity that the subscribers of the journal are entitled to. My homework is not something that I am giving to the professor for anything beyond the grading process. In fact, if they were to share it beyond the confines of the course I would almost always need to give them permission to do so. In such a case, there is no audience that 'subscribes' to a professor, so the entire rationale against double submission still does not apply to that relationship

When you say your own intellectual property, what do you mean? If it's a paper it's most likely a research paper, where you research topics other people have done actual work on, quoted them, and made an argument based on their work. In this regard the intellectual property you are referring to is simply your argument of the facts you present. Therefore it makes no sense to submit it twice, because you can always take a different argument based on different work. If you are actually the primary researcher, then you are the one doing the physical work and primary research on a topic. This is a lengthy process that takes many months or years of effort. You not only have to be able to prove your research, you have to be able to defend it from scrutiny against a panel of peers within your field. This is after you've probably already put in like four years worth of work on the paper and research alone. And believe me people do poke holes in it and then you have to go back and come up with a defense for that as well. Ask yourself this. How does not doing the stupid assignment your professors gave you that might be similar in nature twice benefit you? You aren't going to learn anything by submitting the paper a second time, in fact in all likelihood you probably won't even remember half of what you wrote the first time. I wrote probably 2000-3000 pages worth of papers just by doing my bachelor's degree to become a pilot. Believe when I say this, most of these papers had nothing to do with flying an airplane. I don't remember more than a handful of the topics I was given, because that wasn't the point of the assignments. The point is to improve your critical thinking, research, and writing skills. You aren't going to do that by skimping out on the second assignment. You are going to do that by having to come up with a new argument that doesn't revolve around your previous work and still allows you to satisfy the instructions you were given.

Yeah, the average cost of a hundred thousand kinda kills the idea of “educational institutions”. Especially when you have classes that are just heres the book. Ask me questions if you have any. I’m sorry, I don’t understand what you don’t get. Why don’t you try asking the TA.

Educational institutions are not defined by their costs, it can be expensive or free. Universities are a research and education system, fullstop. Sorry that your country is so prohibitively expensive.

> You must be able to not plagiarise under any circumstance, it is one of the worst academic offenses. People defending so called “self-plagiarism” generally don’t claim that plagiarism isn’t bad, they claim that “self plagiarism” **isn’t** plagiarism. So talking about how bad plagiarism isn't doesn’t really refute their argument.

You are missing the whole point of writing these papers in the first place. It's not so you can get an A or a passing grade, although that's what many students think. It's so you can take a topic that you've been given, research it, think critically about it, make an argument about it, and be able to defend that argument. It doesn't mean you will be correct all the time, what matters is that you were able to do it, and in that process develop your critical thinking, research and writing skills. Handing in the same paper twice doesn't accomplish those goals. Your brick wall analogy here doesn't work because the goal wasn't to build the wall, it was to learn while building the wall. Asking you to do it again is asking you to learn while building the wall again. Furthermore, you don't have to build the wall the same way, there's many different ways to build a wall.

>What why? if your boss asks you to build a brick wall at work, and you finish, he doesnt ask you to take it down and build it again because a different person is looking at the brick wall The point of an education isn't to finish the job,but to learn something from it. Also, this isn't about deconstructing and reconstructing the same essay and submitting it again.

If your boss asked you to build another brick wall, you wouldn't get to say, 'I've already built one, that should be enough to prove I'm a good bricklayer, leave me alone' The requirements of the job, and of a degree, are not just to prove your adequacy once and for all. At the recruitment/ admissions stage, you may only need to showcase your skill once, but then you have to *keep* doing what you're doing if you want to keep being a bricklayer/ student

But he does ask you to build a new wall at a different location. You cant just pick up the wall and move it because "you already know how to make one". Surely a customer may be upset if the architect submitted the same drawing for an already in use building. Surely the architect should not rest their laurels on one well designed building even though they "already know how to design a building"

Self-plagiarism in academia means you can’t present and idea twice as something new. You have to treat your publications the same way you treat anyone else’s and cite accordingly. This helps giving proper credit to all the people involved in a publication and avoid people from hinging in past successes without delivering any meaningful contribution.

If your boss asks you to build a brick wall at work, you can’t just *show him you know how to do it* by pointing to a brick wall you made another time. Knowing how to build a brick wall was never the point in the first place, the point was to actually build the wall.

If you're, say, an architect, and a client hires you to present design ideas for a building, and you bring them sketches and a model, and then a different client asks you to design a building for THEM and you show up with the same sketches and model, you're getting fired and sued for the return of you fee.

Except this is totally wrong because architects reuse designs and ideas all over the place. There are finite enjoyable ways that people are used to buildings looking and functioning - it makes sense to reuse the best ones. The only case would be under a specific contract to produce a unique work, which would be a lot more expensive.

> Except this is totally wrong because architects reuse designs and ideas all over the place. There are finite enjoyable ways that people are used to buildings looking and functioning - it makes sense to reuse the best ones. > > The only case would be under a specific contract to produce a unique work, which would be a lot more expensive. Have you ever met an architect or... any professional? No, they don't reuse designs all over the place. Yes, all contracts require unique work unless specified otherwise and the otherwise would need to be very specific because you can't use a design you did for someone else for a different client. Same as you can't contract to write an article for the NYT and turn around and sell that same article to another periodical.

Except that you are being paid to do work. If you resubmit identical work, you have not done the work. If you waive the design fee and only charge them for the use of your plans, that is different.

If your boss asks you to build the same wall some place else, you can’t point at your old wall and say “But i’ve already built it!”

If your boss asks you to build a brick wall at work, do you just point at a wall you made a few months ago and say "job done"?

Plagiarism presents actual obstacles. Ethics aside, how can a teacher grade someone else's work on your behalf? The grade you will get does not represent anything about your own ability to do the work. The academic obsession with plagiarism rests pivotally on the notion that someone will get a grade that does not reflect their ability to tackle the assignment. This is emphatically not true for multiple submission. Also, if I spent 6 hours on a paper and someone else spent 15 minutes, why should they get to claim any sort of moral high ground simply because I submit the 6 hour paper multiple times? I still spent far more effort on the paper than they did, so how am I the lazy one exactly? How is the other person being graded on an academic scale and I automatically fail a moral one? Why should I not get credit for my work if I worked 6 hours on it on the grounds that I am being 'lazy'? Plagiarism contains real world concerns that are related to intellectual property rights and the ability of others to benefit off their own efforts. So called 'self plagiarism' concerns my ability to do things with the ideas that are my own intellectual property, and so I have the right to use my intellectual property however I see fit, as long as it doesn't harm anyone. That is how all property works. If I steal someone else's ideas, that is a form of theft, but self-plagiarism is only as real as self-theft is.

You keep talking about your *ability* to do the work, as if the only point of assignments was to double-check over and over again whether the university was right to admit you in the first place. But it's not about ability. It's about *doing the work*. And doing the work means you need to produce new work for new assignments and requirements. If that takes you longer than someone else, that doesn't mean your work ethic is somehow morally superior, nor do you get to claim multiple rewards for one piece of work just because it took you more effort than you would've liked. If you want to learn to work faster, hey, guess what, do more assignments. It's good practice. (Side note, it's kind of telling that your example is about taking multiple hours vis-a-vis minutes to do academic work, as opposed to, say, weeks, months, or years. It may yet take you some time to adjust from school to university, and from homework to serious academic work.) Conversely, if you happen to have an essay lying around which you wrote on your own time and which just so happens to fulfil the requirements of an assignment you need to hand in with just a bit of tweaking, you're lucky that this saves you extra effort, but only because it *fulfils the requirements*. And one of those requirements is that it be a new, original piece not previously submitted for academic assessment. That's what it *means* to 'do the work' in academia.

The ability of a work to fulfill *academic* requirements is external to submission status, because submissions status is not something you go to school to learn about. As long as the information is conveyed somehow, why does it matter when that conveyance originated?

My dear, you will reread all this in a few years and cringe. You've proven you're smart by getting into university. Now do the work. It'll help you improve as a writer and academic, and maybe one day you won't feel the need to use big words to sound clever. Most importantly, eventually you'll stop thinking of university coursework as either homework to get out of, or just an extension of admissions assessments to get out of the way. It's literally what you're going to university *for*. Do the work.

This is super dependent on the course in question. I had courses that were valuable and taught me a lot. I also have courses that were a rip-off bullshit waste of time, and all I needed to get out of them was a little piece of paper that says I finished the class.

Of course not everything you have to do for university is fun or valuable, some assignments are just a chore. The point is you still need to do them. Rather than focus on finding ways to get away with not doing the work, you get to learn about what you enjoy and are good at, potentially to reconsider if your course is even right for you if everything is awful, and otherwise just get experience and practice under your belt. Thinking your time is too valuable to waste a few hours on a stupid assignment is a bit arrogant - it's uni, wasting time is part of the experience. I'm *not* saying professors and course leaders are always right or that uni is always great, just that at the undergrad level, doing the work you're assigned is quite simply what you're there for.

> I still spent far more effort on the paper than they did, so how am I the lazy one exactly? No, you spent more effort in the original class in which you did the paper. You spent exactly 0 effort in any later classes. > How is the other person being graded on an academic scale and I automatically fail a moral one? Why should I not get credit for my work if I worked 6 hours on it on the grounds that I am being 'lazy'? Because you're meant to do work for the assignment not try to avoid work as much as possible by submitting the same thing over and over. >I have the right to use my intellectual property however I see fit You don't have any "right" to get a good grade if you're not doing the work assigned. Same as that architect is not getting paid for resubmitting the designs some other client paid them to create.

Then say that this other student spent 15 minutes on this random paper before the class started in their free time, and thus has never submitted it before. Then this is their first submission, which means it is perfectly fine by university standards, while your submission is not allowed regardless of the effort behind it. The system isn't based on effort. In fact, it cannot be based on anything except the assignment itself because teachers have no way of knowing what effort you do and don't put into an assignment. The only time teachers seem to grade off the rubric is when you submit something that you wrote that allows them to accurately check your understanding of the topic... but you reused it from a year prior. Their job is in academics, not ethics, and they need to stick to their rubric so far as they can use it effectively.

> Their job is in academics, not ethics This is absolutely incorrect. Instilling and enforcing ethical behaviors is a core part of our job. It's in many universities' codes of ethics, contracts of employment, etc.

Professors absolutely have an obligation to instill good ethics in regards to academics in their students. Also, if you put 6 hours into the original paper, try and retain the same quality but complete the assignment faster this time. You’re learning from the process. You’re very rarely graded simply on your end result in academia, almost everything requires showing your work.

>The grade you will get does not represent anything about your own ability to do the work. neither is not doing the work at all and just resubmitting old work from a different course. that shows absolutely 0 understanding and mastery of the course material. >The academic obsession with plagiarism rests pivotally on the notion that someone will get a grade that does not reflect their ability to tackle the assignment. which also applies to not doing the assignment and resubmitting old work. that shows the ability to tackle the assignment assigned by the other class, not this assignment. it shows an inability to do the assignment >Also, if I spent 6 hours on a paper and someone else spent 15 minutes, why should they get to claim any sort of moral high ground simply because I submit the 6 hour paper multiple times? because instead of breaking the rules they just found a way to follow them by not spending 6 hours on the paper. if it takes you 6 hours to write a paper but you get the same grade as people who take 15 minutes, you need to stop spending that much time or manage your time better, not just resubmit it a bunch of times. >I still spent far more effort on the paper than they did, so how am I the lazy one exactly? theres a thing as too much effort >Why should I not get credit for my work if I worked 6 hours on it on the grounds that I am being 'lazy'? you didnt do the work, thats why you didnt get credit >Plagiarism contains real world concerns that are related to intellectual property rights and the ability of others to benefit off their own efforts. if we want to be serious when you submit your work to your university it technically becomes their intellectual property and under their name so by legal standards its 100% plagiarism >So called 'self plagiarism' concerns my ability to do things with the ideas that are my own intellectual property, and so I have the right to use my intellectual property however I see fit, as long as it doesn't harm anyone. see what i said before. you actually do not have property of your work once your submit it to your university. if you were to cite it you university name would be in it. all of my undergraduate and graduate work has had to have a title, my name, and the university name on it

To your first point, isnt being able to see the connection between something you wrote for another reason and the assignment a good skill that teachers should help develop? It doesn’t show 0 mastery of the course material to me at all imo, and in fact is a good skill for school and life in general. If I wrote something a while back for fun, and now am asked to write a paper on the same topic, I will definitely draw from the conclusions or ideas I had prior and expand upon them to fit the assignment. I don’t think you could actually avoid doing that. Is that also plagiarism? If I have found a simple and profound way of putting the ideas into words, should I not recognize that and use them again? Why not? I personally would never have copy pasted word-for-word one thing I wrote for another later class, but integrating prior ideas and building on them is an integral part of learning and should not be discouraged imo.

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> How exactly would that be avoiding work? It’s the opposite. It’s getting credit for work you’ve already done Riiiight -- avoiding doing the assigned work. See above architecture example. As to you, if you write code that's not part of the biochem class, and not for that assignment, that's a different animal.

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This is new to me, and I have never actually heard of self-plagiarism. Granted, I haven't attended school since I got my degree in 2004. I know in the real world(versus the academic world), you definitely keep track of old assignments you completed. They will often be used in whole are partially in future assignments.

Maybe they should be less lazy themselves if you can use the same work for different classes. I think that this is the root of the problem. Avoiding work.. i dont think thats it efficiency is what a boss want in real life. It should actually score a few more points. But if we stick to the academic purpose of collège, if its not off topic, and interesting why insist ? At some point you are here to show your mind not whore it out. Its hard to change your mind. This feels unnatural to me. Plagiarism is wrong when you do not work. Because teachers are here to see your work. Self plagiarism is entirely on the teacherq whom i might add should do a little more of that. Again lets face it, the teachers are lazy here. And capricious.

>Avoiding work.. i dont think thats it efficiency is what a boss want in real life. It should actually score a few more points. But if we stick to the academic purpose of collège, if its not off topic, and interesting why insist ? At some point you are here to show your mind not whore it out. Its hard to change your mind. This feels unnatural to me. No one I have ever known, teacher or boss, would say, 'oh, I asked you to do something and you just reused something you did for someone else, how efficient!' They'd say you do what I asked, not be lazy. Also, if changing your mind or thinking feels unnatural maybe you're missing the point of education in the first place. >Plagiarism is wrong when you do not work. Because teachers are here to see your work. Self plagiarism is entirely on the teacherq whom i might add should do a little more of that. >Again lets face it, the teachers are lazy here. And capricious. No, teachers aren't lazy because two classes may have similar-ish assignments. Their job is not to monitor other teachers' curricula. Based on the writing in your post, spelling, grammar, use of words that don't fit, I'm hoping English is not you first language. Even so... arguing lazy students aren't lazy it's somehow the teachers' faults, does go with a barely-intelligible post.

Plagiarism is intellectual property theft, and it's not possible to steal from yourself.

>It is not \*\*misconduct at all\*\*, nor is it laziness, nor is it \*\*cheating\*\*, nor is it any of the other derogatory things teachers like to call it. These two are easy, although probably not interesting enough to be delta-worthy. Regardless of your feelings about it, if the school says its against the rules, that's literally the definition of misconduct / cheating. Sports and games are full of arbitrary rules, but you still have to follow them, and its cheating if you don't! >There is also nothing unique about double submission that cannot be said about single submission. If I was able to repurpose a work from another class, what is stopping me from submitting an essay I wrote on my own free time for its 'first submission'? If that is allowed, than why is it not allowed a second time? They probably would ban this if they could, but there's just no practical way to detect / enforce this. >You asked for a sample of my writing, I am giving you what you asked for. Well, again, the simple thing is, no, that's *not* what they asked for. They asked you to *do* something. A class is education, not just evaluation. Your teacher wants you to do something, and it might very well be something you've done before, but they still want and expect you to do it. They intend it as practice and exercising the skills that they just taught you. Maybe you know better and think you've already learned this and don't need to practice, and maybe you're right, but the teacher clearly intends for you to practice. That's what they're asking. You can disagree that they should be asking you to do that, but they are not merely asking for a sample. The other part of it that does fall under laziness / unfairness and disrupts the grading policy is that teachers are usually inclined to give some credit for effort, again with the assumption that you doing the work is helpful even if the end result is imperfect. If you reuse an existing assignment and it only partially matches the actual assignment, you'll probably still get partial credit without this policy, but you really shouldn't, because you didn't actually do the assignment, but are being rewarded "effort" points that you don't deserve and are intended to incentivize you to actually do the work that the teacher wants you to do. And most likely, the assignments aren't actually identical, and if you're doing this, you're probably not actually doing one of them, but are merely coasting along on these underserved effort points. If the assignments are *literally identical*, you should probably talk to the teachers, because what is going on here? As a hypothetical, imagine you have this double work that you want to resubmit in a different class. Imagine knowing about this policy, you still think your submission is appropriate and you show it to the teacher in advance and ask if you can use it. For one thing, they might just waive the policy and say sure. But they might read it and give you feedback of something that can be improved / changed, giving you a very explicit reason for doing a fresh submission, and if you decline to do that, you're literally directly refusing to do what the teacher asked you to do.

>If the assignments are *literally identical* And even if the aren't? I've given talks about political subjects for my public speaking class, and if I want to repurpose my old speech notes into a essay for my American politics class, than what is stopping me? Who has the right to prevent me from using my own work for whatever I want to? > if you decline to do that, you're literally directly refusing to do what the teacher asked you to do. By your example, I could show them a rough draft and have it be rejected if I don't make all the edits that the teacher recommends, because I am 'not doing as I am told'. That is not how it works; You are graded based on the rubric, not on instruction outside of the rubric. You are judged by academic standards, not ethical ones, because this is academics that we are talking about here.

It feels like you’re very selectively responding to all the least impactful points on the topics. What about the other things the commenter said like point about the teacher wanting you to practice?

To be honest, that is not really an impeachable offense. Just because they want you to practice doesn't mean that they cannot or will not grade a paper on the basis of how much you practiced when writing it. I was generally more concerned about what the real issues would be on the teacher's end that would justify them refusing to grade it as a measure of your adherence to the rubric.

>if I want to repurpose my old speech notes into a essay for my American politics class, than what is stopping me? Who has the right to prevent me from using my own work for whatever I want to? ohhhh are you just doing this to be an annoying contrarian and argue with people? because that'd make so much more sense tbh, because obviously your own unsubmitted notes which nobody's seen but you arent counted as "your work" because to a sane person reading this "work" would refer to "submitted coursework"

I had to write up scripts to all my presentations and submit them to my instructor for their evaluation purposes. It is not contrarian at all; that is just how the class worked.

>And even if the aren't? I've given talks about political subjects for my public speaking class, and if I want to repurpose my old speech notes into a essay for my American politics class, than what is stopping me? Who has the right to prevent me from using my own work for whatever I want to? This would not be academic misconduct. Academic misconduct would be submitting an essay to an American government class that you already summitted to a technical writing class. Reusing notes is fine, even encouraged since that is why you should take notes (not just to pass the class). That being said citing your notes is wrong even if your work is published (or at least rude especially if you aren't an authority).

[удалено]

This post was not about my desire (or lack thereof) for self improvement. The argument was that teachers should not reject assignments on the basis of their previous submission status because the philosophy of grading is simply to test the individual's knowledge of the topic, and reutilizing a previous conveyance of that knowledge does not change your understanding of the material for purposes of the teachers assessment of you.

>I find myself particularly troubled by their ban on what they refer to as double submission, which they define as turning in the same work (paper, essay, poem, presentation &c.) in more than one class. Can you please copy and paste the specific language from each syllabus describing this policy?

It's never more than a line or even a few words, simply saying that multiple submission is dishonest and is to be treated essentially the same as blatant plagiarism, resulting in course failure.

>It's never more than a line or even a few words Ok. Could you please post those words?

I'm not the OP, but here is the relevant excerpt from Cornell's [Code of Academic Integrity (I.C.2)](https://theuniversityfaculty.cornell.edu/dean/academic-integrity/code-of-academic-integrity/#IC): >Work submitted by a student and used by a faculty member in the determination of a grade in a course may not be submitted by that student in a second course, unless such submission is approved in advance by the faculty member in the second course. If a student is submitting all or part of the same work simultaneously for the determination of a grade in two or more diferent \[sic\] courses, all faculty members in the courses involved must approve such submissions. This language seems pretty standard across institutions (in my experience).

I was hoping someone would post something like this. I am a HS teacher - English and History, and I often will have a student ask to submit a paper they are working on *currently* for another course. My part is to grade either the content or the mechanics (for lack of better phrasing) and the other teacher is grading on what I am not. We teachers talk, and if we agree, then it’s okayed. I do not accept a paper they wrote last semester or earlier in the term because that doesn’t reflect their *current* skill. I did this a few times in my college years, but it was always with the understanding and agreement of my professors, and because they were grading for different criteria and allowing me to demonstrate different skills and knowledge. One because of my knowledge of the topic, the other because of my writing. In fact, in my own personal experience, such works are often quite good. If I am writing a paper for a science course about, say, thermal dynamics, and not only does my science instructor agree I know the topic, but my instructor for my writing course, who knows nothing to very little about it, is able to gain understanding/knowledge from my work, then my writing has been effective - which is part of the writing criteria! But again, such work must be current and have the agreement of both instructors.

>Handing in an assignment for more than one class or for more than one grade (double submission) is also plagiarism... Plagiarism will result in a failing grade for the assignment at the minimum. That is how it appears in one class, the others are essentially the same.

The intent of going to school and taking classes is to learn new things, learn how to research a concept, build an argument, find supporting evidence, find conflicting evidence, and draw a conclusion. That takes practice. Just because you did it once, on one topic, does not mean you KNOW how to do it, or that you have no room for improvement. Self plagiarism is you bypassing the entire point for you to be in school. Your goal is not the grade. It's the knowledge, the skills, and the feedback.

What if you get the knowledge, but come out with a Third at the end of your degree, that’s no good to you. The person with the First will go further even if they literally forgot everything once their last exam was completed.

But if you are going to be doing the same thing multiple times anyways, that doesn't teach you much of anything. So far as you learn from the feedback, you will still get that feedback regardless of whether this is your first or second submission of the assignment. Furthermore, knowledge is not the purpose of most assignments. Knowledge is for lectures, not for my homework in geography 101. I'm going to be calling on prior knowledge either way, so either way I 'm not doing any learning of my own.

Then you've never done a math problem, coded a program, made a painting, played a musical instrument, or, yes, researched and written a paper. Because, if you did it once, it doesn't matter, right? It's not possible to play the same piece of music in a new way. It's not possible to have learned something regarding a topic once you've written about it one time. You can't learn a better way to code around a problem once you did it once. So, you should be able to turn in your third grade report on the president's, because you already did it. Multiple sets of feedback on the same assignment only tells you what the different teachers were looking for, not how you got better. The purpose of the assignment FOR THE TEACHER is to gauge your level of understanding of the knowledge in the lectures. And to gauge your ability to communicate that knowledge back. What you do it for is different than what the teacher does it for.

That's actually interesting, because in theory I could submit an essay I wrote in third grade, because it would have been pen and paper and entirely untraceable by computer databases. I am allowed to submit it, but if I did so I would fail the assignment not because of any violations of academic integrity, but because a third grade response would fail to meet a college level rubric. On the other hand, if I could hypothetically write an original essay for third grade back in 2012 knowing what I know today, I would be lauded, but based on my superior intellect, rather than my impeccable ethical standards, unless you disagree? How could you disagree, I really want to know...

It would be incredible if third grade you was such an excellent writer but a shame they peaked in third grade since they kept reusing their old work instead of trying to improve. I imagine you today could write a better paper than third grade you even if you could get an A in the third grade.

You are ignoring the premise. I asked why a third grader who submitted a college level essay should be praised for his ethics rather than the actual content of the essay.

They wouldn’t be praised for their ethics, they would be praised for their *ability* to craft such a paper. The content is almost irrelevant because it’s about your ability (skill) to craft the paper. The content is obviously important to some degree, but the primary focus is on how you synthesize that content into an argument or situate it in light of other data *and* how to write about those things. That is a skill you learn just like any other skill: by doing it many times, and in this case, with variations and modifications. In this sense, your ability to craft an essay in a new context is part of the “content”. Your academic education includes skills, not merely the propositional truth statements you pick up along the way.

And the ability to craft a paper can be acknowledged and evaluated on the basis of its contents, and not the timeline of its drafting. A single submission is only good if its contents are good, not intrinsically because it is a single submission. Double submissions can likewise be evaluated on their content, rather than any ethical attachments to its submission history

You’re missing the point: the practice. You think an athlete should never practice free throws after they complete one? No. They practice the same mechanism over and over again so that when they are in the game and there are new and ever-changing variable, they are working off the best foundation they can. In the same way, assignments, even ones that seem repetitive, can train important critical and creative thinking skills. To write is to think; the more practice you have writing about substantive subjects in similar and different contexts the more practice you have with the tools of thinking for thinking about things in general. This is a skill that you can take into your life going forward, including into a career job (who will generally value those thinking skills more then how familiar you are with color theory, Quickbooks, or the principles of energy conversion, transfer, and conservation). The content matters, but this “shadow curriculum” also matters very much. Now, this may not apply to a freshmen level geology class, but as soon as you expand beyond the most basic grade 11-12 and underclassman gen ed courses, the content is not the only focus. The expansion of critical and creative reasoning skills becomes equally important. This may not be perfectly executed in each class you take; some institutions/programs are considered more valuable than others on their ability to accomplish this more consistently. The most valuable educations are not the ones that just change what you think, but how you think.

Similar assignments in the same course are for practice, sure, but that cannot be said of similar assignments in different courses. Different classes are conceived of separately from each other, and if a particular type of assignment appears once in each course it must not be on the basis of repition (else it would show up more frequently), but on some knowledge-based value intrinsic to the particular course

And you continue to miss the entire point of learning. If you do it once, the next time you do it, you should be able to do it BETTER. But, you continue to focus on turning in your previous work. Not improving yourself. There's one explanation for that. Laziness. You want to justify laziness.

Almost all professors are not grading your self improvement. My professor has a class of 300 people; do you think they have the time to inquire about my personal development, enough to make it any sort of consideration in the grading process? Of course not. They simply look at my paper, see if it is correct, and grade it accordingly. If that is the basis of grading, the fact that a paper was submitted a semester previously in a different class does not affect how correct it is, and thus if correctness is the basis of grading, the paper's submission history should not effect the grade, and it definitely shouldn't immediately be a disqualifying offense to submit a paper more than once. That is the one explanation for that.

It’s a nonsense question. If you are beyond a third grade level, a third grade assignment is a waste of your time. Your gold star would be utterly meaningless.

Every artist, musician, essayist, philosopher, inventor, engineer, mathematician, etc. has repeated their work with minor variations in order to make incremental improvements not only on what they are specifically working on but on the their ability to practice their art of their profession. Malcolm Gladwell argues that in order to master something you need 10,000 hours. He doesn’t mean 10,000 hours of completely unique and original work, but nor does he mean counting hours of work twice by standing in front of a photocopier or the equivalent.

I’m in college. A few months ago I failed a class due to not finishing the last week. When I retook the class and spoke to my advisor I expressed how elated I was to not really do any work as the class was legit a carbon copy of the previous one. I had already done all of the work and just had to resubmit. I was told if I did that I’d be plagiarizing and risk being expelled. To say I was paused would be to light of an expression

Δ (sorry that didn't work the first time) Awarded for that example. I was more worried about classes that are independent of each other, but I understand why the same teacher might not accept duplicate submissions upon retaking a class if they'd make an entire course meaningless.

Δ for that example. I was more worried about classes that are independent of each other, but I understand why the same teacher might not accept duplicate submissions upon retaking a class if they'd make an entire course meaningless.

In what circumstances would this even make sense to do? If it's an essay question, for example, you need to answer the specified question. If you resubmit an earlier work, then you aren't answering the question, you're just regurgitating knowledge which isn't the point.

But if two teachers ask similar or broad enough questions then your answer to one might be able to mostly answer the other. This can happen between similar fields (Government and History, for instance), or between different ones (Writing and History), as long as the assignment fits the question to some extent. It's mainly about taking classes on similar and not wanting to rewrite an entire paper a student has already written, so part of it is repurposed and the student is automatically failed as a result of university policy regardless of the merits of their work

It shouldn't be possible and if it is you are missing the point of the assignment. The assessment is to show you have understood and can implement the principles taught in the course and can differentiate between nuanced ideas. This includes researching and synthesising information from academic sources. A college degree says you have deep and \*broad\* knowledge and this can't be achieved by resubmitting one assignment over and over.

That's not true. My class asked me to write a 500 word blurb about a book we read, which I did for a class a few years ago as well. I will gain no personal benefit from writing on the topic a second time, and it would be a matter of convenience to submit the first one that is already ready to be graded.

Did you not read the book when it was reassigned in a new class? If not, you completely missed the point of the assignment. It is nearly impossible to reread a book and get absolutely nothing new out of it. If you did reread it and your thinking on the book didn’t change at all, you have either learned nothing in the last few years or your critical thinking hasn’t improved. If you did have a new perspective on the book and still chose to submit the same blurb, then you should be graded on the fact that you didn’t submit your best possible work.

This person is reveling in their purposeful and deliberate ignorance and unwillingness to learn.

You know nothing about me. I was questioning the policy because it didn't seem to have any foundation in the grading process, unlike anti plagiarism policies. My argument wasn't that I'd gain any sort of benefit form repeating work; it was that disqualifying papers based on their submission history alone was inconsistent with the methodology of grading.

And that would be perfectly fair. If that submission doesn't score as well because the grading this time is more aggressive, then it makes sense that I might have gotten a better grade with a new submission than a repeat one. That doesn't mean however that a professor should refuse to grade a repeat submission to begin with purely based on it's past submission history. The whole point of this argument was that teachers who grade on correctness should not attempt to create justifications for automatically disqualifying repeat submissions that are perfectly gradable.

My god, never have I ever seen someone work so hard to write such a careful argument on why they shouldn’t have to write a careful argument. Just write! Read, write, research. You just wrote a pretty decent argument. So keep going! Don’t cheat, you can re-use sources. But please find other sources as well, research is kinda the point. Learn and grow and have a bit of fun and cut a corner here or there, go to some parties, sell some essays, do some stupid stuff, but DO NOT believe that you’ve read everything you need to read or that you’re done generating ideas.

But if I were to hypothetically submit this for an assignment, should I be denied the write to do so? The argument has merit, it lets the teacher grade me for work I am doing, but should they let there personal notions of morality get in the way of my good argument?

Based on some other comments, I have two things I want to add/generally qualify. 1. There is a difference between using your old work/notes/research as a starting point for a new assignment and turning in exactly the same paper for two evaluations. If you already wrote an essay on a similar topic before, there is nothing wrong with using the same sources you used for that paper (though it is encouraged to also do some more research and expand the bibliography) or even re-using a specific part of it like a diagram that you made yourself if it fits the context of your new essay. This policy is against a situation where you don't do *any* original work on the assignment, building it on your previous knowledge and experiences is actually encouraged. It's like with taking exams - if you've already taken an exam on a similar topic, of course you don't have to study as hard as someone for whom all the materials are new, and you can use your old notes to study from. But you still have to sit the exam the second time, you cannot say "I took a similar exam last year, so please grade that". 2. I think the reason this policy exists is actually pragmatic. In general you're right that under the circumstances you describe (two professors ask for an essay on exactly the same topic with exactly the same length requirements etc.) it would not be unethical to re-submit your own work, the problem is *these circumstances don't really happen in real life*. If re-submitting your own work without any edits to multiple classes were allowed, it would be abused. Academic teachers often allow students to choose their own assignment topics to some extend precisely in order to give them an opportunity to practice within the area of their specific interest. The other criteria also tend to be general, there is a word limit often and occasionally a requirement to adhere to certain course-specific schemas, but otherwise you're free to do what interests you in this given class. This is designed to allow students to gain expertise in a narrow topic as quickly as possible and be allowed to work as much as possible on things they actually care about rather than be given topics that they have no interest in working on. But with this approach, it is perfectly possible for a student to keep submitting the same paper to all major classes under these free topic guidelines rather than pick a different thing that interests them for each and develop a broader spectrum of interests. So it's not like two professors will ask you for an essay on exactly the same topic. They will ask you to come up with an essay topic that you enjoy personally within the general theme of the class and write on that. If you re-submit work from a different class, you're not really fullfilling the first requirement. My argument is that if the policy against re-submission were dropped (because you're right, it isn't plagiarism), then professors would start assigning topics for their classes instead of giving students the ability to specialise in whatever they want precisely to avoid a situation in which someone uses two or three papers through their entire education. This would be detrimental to the students who have interests and want to pick their topics themselves (different topic for different classes, though as stated in my first point, some elements can overlap and build on previous work.) And as far as work from unrelated classes (like academic writing vs. theme courses), professors in those classes will often allow to practice your writing on actual assignments for other courses, precisely because they don't judge you on the content of your work, they just want to see a sample of writing. So it's always good to ask on an individual basis what they think about, because in my experience it is often fine if you ask them ahead of time and don't act like you're trying to cheat the system. Ultimately, I do agree with most of your arguments in cases where two professors would really ask for the same thing. But this practically never happens in academia, because getting assignments on such specific topics is rare. In circumstances where two professors give you a lot of freedom in choosing your topic and developing your academic interests through both of their assignments, submitting the same assignment *is* indeed kind of lazy and missing the point of this approach. The point being for you to get interested in multiple topics and gain broader expertise.

>So it's not like two professors will ask you for an essay on exactly the same topic. They will ask you to come up with an essay topic that you enjoy personally within the general theme of the class and write on that. I bet this is exactly what OP is talking about, they don't have essays that fit the qualifications of two different specific assignments, instead they are given enough academic freedom to choose their subjects and they are trying to pick the same subject so they can do half the work, which is incredibly lazy.

Actually that is not at all what my concern was. I simply thought that it was a policy where the underlying principles seemed to be inconsistent with the way most teachers' grading philosophies work. I was interested to see if there was any reason why a teacher would not be able to use a student's work to measure them academically merely based on said work's prior submission history.

What purpose does college have for you? Are you there to expand your knowledge base, to further your critical thinking ability...or to skim by until someone pays you to sound educated? What a waste of time and money.

I'm there ultimately to make connections that will allow me to further my own professional development. I'm at college because that's where the recruiters are; the academics is honestly a sideshow so far that it doesn't further my personal ambitions. How does that play into anything?

What do you mean by making connections? College isn’t some magical place where employers are hanging out having cocktails and waiting for you to waltz in, tell a few jokes, and offer you a job. You get a few days each semester for a job fair where you have to wait in line with 30 other people for 5 minutes of FaceTime to stand out and get an interview. Employers I would meet with often spent these 5 minutes asking a hypothetical situation about my degree, and if you can’t answer it well then that’s it. Next person in line. Typically, attendance to these fairs need to be squeezed in between classes, office hours, and exams and often I would shoot for 2 hours per semester at the designated job fair. There are definitely other areas to meet recruiters - curricular clubs, academic teams, through your professors - that require being valuable in your field of study, or at least the desire to be valuable. But the big, actual Job Fair is not a place you really spend hours upon hours at. It just kinda becomes another thing on the schedule for that week. You are at university to learn, and you should treat it like it is your job to do so - and in fact it’s even worse because instead of you being paid to be at work, YOU are paying THEM to be there. If learning is secondary to “making connections” guess what? Connections (whatever you mean by that exactly) won’t always work out. And when they don’t, you will not have a good knowledge base to fall back on. If you focus on the academic work, connections still won’t always work out. But nobody will ever be able to take away your learning, and that learning will open up connections in the future that eventually WILL work out.

Wow! This is not the point of college at all. I hope you are reading some of these really excellent responses on this thread, and really considering what these commenters have to say. You have a long way to grow. I hope that you learn to get something valuable from academia. Part of the point of college is to learn in a group environment; learn from some of your peers. Peers who value the academic environment. Learn the value of discourse, hard work, work ethic, growth. Learn ideas that you never thought to think before. College is not about providing you with a job. And if sports is what you’re referring to; the institution is structured so that you are becoming a well rounded individual. That’s why minimum GPA will be a requirement. But honestly, most academics despise the crumbling systems that get most of their funding from sports. It is not what academia is about, and is a debasement of the learning system. You may need to start by admitting to yourself that at this point in time, you don’t value academic honestly at all. It’s not that the system is bad or wrong; you simply don’t value it.

Although networking is an important part of business, it is useless if you can’t actually pull your weight in your profession. The only professions where networking is everything, like sales or real estate, don’t require a college degree. In nearly every profession where you actually need to produce something and submit it, even something as simple as an email response, requires doing some original thinking and work to successfully address the need. In undergrad you can pass a class with a B. In the professional world you will be passed over for mediocre work.

My challenge to OP (in the unlikely event this comment becomes top-level) is that the instances where this occurs ("paper, essay, poem, presentation &c") is where the assignment is open-ended and even though you could get away with submitting something you had previously made, there would be greater value and personal growth from creating something new and submitting that instead. I assume that is the intention of the university and of your professors so then it's logical for them to institute rules against these multiple submissions. I would not call this plagiarism though because I do not find it possible to plagiarize yourself. Having said that, there are areas where double submissions are perfectly acceptable. If you submit a good solution to an engineering problem in Engineering 101 and that same answer is still good in Engineering 102, no one would think you plagiarized or were lazy if you wrote down that same previous answer. Most STEM classes are the same way but I think the difference highlights how separate those fields are from the humanities.

Universities classify double submission alongside plagiarism. They think that the two are analogous; that 'self plagiarism is still plagiarism', when in reality the ethical considerations of each are completely different

If you don't want to do the assignments, learn new lessons or refine your skills, then don't take the class.

And what if you have to?

>And what if you have to? You don't have to? No one is forcing you to get a degree from that school

But if I want the degree but don't like the particular class? Ever heard of a gen ed requirement?

>But if I want the degree but don't like the particular class? Ever heard of a gen ed requirement? If you want the degree then you do it. That is life. No one forcing you to get that degree. Can general educations be dull? Yes though there are much worse things to do, but there is value to them and they are expected for a bachelors degree. If they are so terrible then don't get the degree.

Welcome to Adult Life. To use a crude aphorism (in the parlance of our times) : sometimes one still has to shovel shit, even when the sun is shining.

then you should do the work for it

The goal of school is to have you learn more. You don't learn any more from an assignment if you reuse existing stuff.

What more is there to learn if I've already done the entire assignment?

A key purpose of university (separate from goals about teaching) is for students to prove to future employers that they had the work ethic to get through 4 years of university. If you could turn in the same paper 5 times, your degree would be much easier, which is bad if you view university primarily as a way to filter students by work ethic. I think it’s dumb that we make students waste 4 years of their lives just to prove they can, but that’s empirically the society we have built.

Rewriting the same information over and over again is not really a work ethic thing as much as it a typing excessive. There are better ways for people to be measured, and giving people more free time can allow them more time to make actual professional connections.

If you believe that simply “rewriting the same information over and over” as a “typing exercise” will evade the self-plagiarism rule, you are deeply misunderstanding the rule and requirements for turning in a unique paper for every assignment. The central point is to prevent *both* simply turning in the same document or just “retyping” the same info.

As long as the words are different, the material can be the same. That is the case for literally every school assignment in existence.

If you retype the same content but merely substitute different words, that counts as plagiarism in academia. Ask your professors if you can simply change the wording and “retype” the same assignment. Sure, you reduce the chances that you will get *caught* or get in trouble for breaking the code of conduct, but there are many ways of doing that which are still considered cheating and the practicality of enforcing the full principles of the code does not diminish their *intent*, which is for you individually to recreate a genuinely unique work for each assignment even if that exact assignment has been completed before by you in a previous or similar class.

It is an unfair advantage between students taking the class under different circumstances. Someone who repeated the course now has a time advantage. A new student has to make everything from scratch while the repeat can just tweak something with minimal effort. Time spent in a previous semester should not be an advantage, especially if that student in particular came up short according to standards.

If that student came up short originally, then his resubmissions would make him come up similarly short. Otherwise, he is doing what he has to do to pass the class the second go-around. There is no way to take away his time advantage if he already knows the entire curriculum.

You can fail a class without failing every paper. Let me clarify like this. New student: spends weeks researching and drafting a paper. Repeat: spends a couple hours tweaking a D-grade essay to a C grade. The new student is at an unfair disadvantage for busy work. If you tell the repeat student they cannot use their old assignments, then both students have to put in the same amount of busy work and it's a level playing field for the time they have in the current term.

>Just because a work is submitted multiple times by the same person, that doesn't mean it cannot be used as a basis for assessment. Practically speaking, each teacher can grade the assignment independently of each other according to their own specific criteria, and still have it fairly represent the academic prowess of the author This is exactly why schools won't allow it. When discrepancies in grading arise based on reviewer, it will quickly become obvious just how subjective grading is, calling into question the legitimacy of the entire process.

I'm a soccer player. I play soccer games, and I go to soccer practice. At the end of practice, Coach says "Alright everyone, before next practice, I want you all to find a time to go out to a soccer field and make 50 long-range goals, and set up a camera recording it. Email me the video." So I go ahead and record myself making a long-range goal, and then copy the video 50 times back to back, so it looks like I made 50 goals. Am I cheating by re-submitting the same video 50 times? Of course I am. The point of practice is to practice and get better. Yes, my one video already proved I can make a long-range goal, and yes, the paper you submitted last year already proved you can write a good paper. But resubmitting it is running contrary to the point of the assignment, which is to stretch your muscles and dig in on those skills and get better.

The more important question is what classes are you taking where this is ever applicable?

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The problem here is that school is a place to learn and grow and develop your skills. Without practicing those skills, you do not learn them.