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  • LAVA Moderator: Mysterier

re-using papers

it is not cool

where i went for undergrad it is not acceptable, i know this because i tried it my junior year and the teacher found out, to my surprise the teacher did not do anything but come and talk to me and ask me to do the assignment again... but if i was not on that professors good side... i do believe that he may have turned me in for academic charges of duplication of previous grade work... i think it is stupid, but i also see the point...

peace out cub scouts
B
 
Yup. Always gotta be careful when it comes to doing something "iffy" like this... best to check out your school's policy.
 
tell the professor or TA what's up. Say you did some previous work on a similar topic and you would like to use portions of your thoughts from that paper appropriately edited to adress the topic of this paper, because you think they will provide some insight into the topic at hand. They usually don't have a problem with it.
 
I agree with pennywise as far as this being an ideal solution. I've had people bring situations like this to me before and I've talked about ways that they could take the same topic but talk about it in a different direction and it would be acceptable. I think if you're taking a class that's outside of your major it's even more encouraging if you can show me that you've been able to bridge the gap between your major and my class.

This whole situation is why I generally don't let students pick their own paper topics from a wide variety of subjects, and why I totally avoid any massively overdone topics!
 
I've done this before.. however I've always tweaked the paper to fit the course it's intended for... just being honest. :\
 
I've done something similar before, but only with the express permission and knowledge of both teachers.

I had a creative writing course, and a Gothic lit class. One assignment for the creative writing course was a short story (obviously), in my gothic lit class the 'end of semester' essay could of either been a comparative essay. Or, a short story + a small academic component explaining how you circumvented / used / altered traditional gothic conventions in a story.

I figured "Hey, why not kill 2 birds with one stone". But, I talked to both proffs before doing it, and in the end - they were interested in different aspects of the story. The creative writing one was more concerned with the revise/edit after the story got 'work shopped', and the other proff was more concerned in the academic component that accompanied the story (and, the story that got submitted with the essay was not the revised story either).
 
This whole situation is why I generally don't let students pick their own paper topics from a wide variety of subjects, and why I totally avoid any massively overdone topics!
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but writing a paper or doing a project over something not personally interesting is absolutely terrible, you don't really get into it and learn like you might if you are able to pick a topic you really enjoy
 
but writing a paper or doing a project over something not personally interesting is absolutely terrible, you don't really get into it and learn like you might if you are able to pick a topic you really enjoy
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Reading essentially the same paper about the same topic 100+ times is also absolutely terrible. ;) I'm not saying that a student can't study something they're interested in, but I'd ideally give them a selection of things which they'd never heard of or thought about being interested in, and have them go more in depth in that than re-hash something that they're already well-studied in. The point of learning is to go further and beyond what you have already, and if people stick to the topics which they know they like already they rarely seek out new knowledge with which to write their papers.
 
empirical warning:

a professor I'm working for is giving a student an F on a paper for recycling work.

ebola
 
I've done it before, but only with significant enough editing and addition that I can't imagine any professor would have a problem with it.
 
I'll elaborate that we could tell the work was recycled because the student didn't answer the fucking question we asked.

ebola
 
it is not plagiarism to re-use your own work. However, chances are the school and the professors don't want you to do it so they will come up with some reasoning for treating you badly if they catch you doing it. Like calling it "self-plagiarism".
 
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