Retaking a class & reusing written assignments?

[sammeecat]

Not sure if this is the right place to post this -- forgive me if it doesn't fit in with other topics here.

Is it ethical or right to reuse written assignments when retaking a class? The assignments were written by the student, just used in another semester when the class was previously taken but not completed.

Thanks in advance!

[TMW2010]

I had this discussion with my colleagues (I teach at two 'professional' colleges that grant A.A.S. degrees). Many schools have a straight up policy that it is not allowed and that is provided in writing within the school's academic integrity policy. If it's not stated explicitly in the policy, it is generally up to the class instructor. If the student petitions the instructor and the instructor says 'yes, it can be reused', it's cool. If the student doesn't ask the instructor and get their blessing (as it were) and are caught, the student could be in violation of their school's academic integrity policy as a plagiarist, which even though they may have been your own ideas (and you can't steal your own ideas) it's still considered a violation. In my experience, when given the leeway to choose, many instructors will decline to allow the student to reuse the work.

[UptonSinclair]

Just having to ask is a good sign that your gut is telling you it is wrong.

[clep3705]

If you reuse any work including your own, antiplagiarism software would flag it as plagiarism. That's assuming the original was submitted to the same software's database.

There is NOTHING wrong with reusing your own work. It might be against the rules, but it is not an ethical or moral transgression. Only in academic la la land are such ridiculous rules made up. In the business world, reusing previous work is considered a sign of efficiency. The academic community is hypocritical about reusing one's own work. How many different papers do academics churn out on the same research? As many as they can.

[sanantone]

There is no consensus on this in academia. Even the professors in my master's program at a traditional school had differing opinions on this. Colorado Technical University will let you reuse your own work. All you have to do is let the instructor know you reused some of your own work because they run all papers through Turnitin. My professor in my PhD program at a traditional school advised us to try to write all of our papers for our courses with our dissertation in mind. He told us about a student who was able to gather all of his papers together and almost had his dissertation done. We were also told that we could expand on our master's thesis, split up our dissertation into smaller publications after graduating, or turn our dissertation into a book.

[AlbaTiVo]

I would reuse any of my work with no qualms. It is MY work after all.

[publius2k4]

Ethically, I see no issue with this at all. Some might call this laziness, but it is my philosophy that laziness is the mother of innovation.

If my professor has a problem with me using a paper that I had already used in the past, I would tell them that I had a problem with them reusing the same test questions from previous terms....and for that matter, if the professor has an issue with me reusing my work, I'd say that it's their fault for reusing the exact same assignment.

[cookderosa]

My graduate degree program had a debate about this earlier this month. I see no violation.

[mrs.b]

Just having to ask is a good sign that your gut is telling you it is wrong.

I agree with this one. Ethics is a variable line that differs from person to person, but if you're questioning it enough to ask strangers on a public form, chances are your moral compass has it at least partially flagged. If you're just looking for a shortcut, you can reuse research and your outline without any violations, even under the strictest of plaigerism policies. You already found articles, books, and so on that were relevant, and the format of the paper can remain the same so long as the wording is not identical. So...pull up some other quotations from the articles, and use the outline to format your paper. Rewriting a paper takes very little time when the front-end work of research and outline is already done. Then it will definitely be original work since you just rewrote it, but you've still saved hours of digging through the library archives and retaking notes.

[EI2HCB]

It depends on the school. Excelsior policy indicates that work you previously wrote and submitted must be cited correctly as from the original document.