Twitter discussion: on plagiarism

[Puget]

The reason it makes no sense is the same reason it makes no sense to tell a student they can't reuse papers.  It's not likely that a prompt will be exactly the same in two different classes.  I see nothing wrong from a moral perspective with a student taking a previously written paper and using substantial parts of it but tweaking it for the current course.

Where did I say anything about a student reusing their own work? I very clearly said "when a student copies someone else's work".

Actually it seems likely that prompts will be very similar from one course to another, if professors are recycling each other's courses. And even if they are not recycling, they often don't make much effort to make paper topics very distinctive.

But unless someone is re-taking a course, it's especially weird to think that the prompt in one course would be exactly the same as the prompt in another course that isn't excluded for someone having taken the first one. That degree of overlap is extremely shoddy at the department level.

Right-- I might use similar prompt to my colleague teaching a course elsewhere, or the one teaching the same course here in alternating years, but that's immaterial to the student who is only taking that class once (and if they are repeating it they clearly didn't learn it the first time, so they should in fact do it again).

So I can't imagine submitting the same paper across classes would lead to a very good grade hardly ever. To the extent that they try it, they are cheating themselves by not learning anything new.

On the other hand, I've had students want to write on the same or related topics across classes where there were points of convergence (say, language development in a developmental psychology course and a linguistics course), meeting the different requirements of each,  and be worried that that wasn't OK-- in those cases I'm happy to tell them this is more than OK, and I am in fact delighted that they are synthesizing across what they are learning in different classes and building deeper, multidisciplinary understanding.

[Caracal]

In lots of fields, there is a lot of material to be taught that is going to be essentially the same everywhere. If I draw a diagram of the forces on an airplane, (thrust, drag, gravity, lift), it will be effectively identical to the ones drawn by every other person teaching the same stuff. For that reason, I've put creative commons licenses on my stuff because it's ridiculous that  so much time is wasted on that. If someone else wants to use one of my diagrams, which is exactly like they would have to produce themselves, FINE AND DANDY. I don't need credit; it was a waste of 10 minutes (or whatever) of my time to make it simply to avoid copyright problems. I'm happy to pay it forward so that no-one else has to waste another 10 minutes (or whatever).

Even in fields where things aren't quite as standardized, there's still a lot of stuff that is either standard or just useful. Good quotes or illustrative anecdotes can help out a lecture a lot. If someone else has them, why wouldn't I want to reuse them? I'm perfectly happy for anyone to do the same. I almost certainly got them from a book I read, so it isn't like I have any particular ownership of them. Its only when I'm really close to my specialty where I'm drawing on all kinds of stuff for lectures, and even occasionally brining in things that come out of my own research. But, that might be one class in a survey.