Second Capstone?

[cookderosa]

One mention on Turnitin & self-plagiarism with WGU. I turned in two papers for (of all classes) Ethical Leadership. Scored my averaged Turnitin scores of 2-5% (fun game chasing 0% but references gets me sometimes!!) WGU emailed over the weekend and informed me there was an error in the system and I would need to resubmit my papers. I did and was eager to check my Turnitin scores - both papers had 100% Plagerism. Even though I knew it was me I did not like seeing that WGU told me not to worry that they would handle it on their end. Both papers passed so all was well in the world.

Good experiment! I had a similar issue back when Turnitin was new - I think I wrote about it here. I had a teacher account, so I ran my paper through it to check it out, see how it worked, etc before turning my paper for my actual class (where I was a student). When I turned it in for real it was flagged because it was already in the system! Lesson learned!

Edit to add: You can ask if you can recycle a previous paper, if they say no, then it's a no- if they don't care, then go for it. It's not a case of plagiarism, which is when you use someone's ideas as your own- in this case you're using your own ideas more than once- it's a matter of obligation to produce new work for the new teacher, not a case of an ethical or legal infringement. If you are a researcher or conducted research, you would have to site that as a source as if it weren't your own, but that's not really what you asked.