Plagiarism – the ultimate sin in the academic world.

We all know what plagiarism is. Educators have burned it in our brains ever since the first time we wrote an essay. Countless “syllabus days” each semester have made it clear to us that copy and pasting a paragraph from Wikipedia into our research project is unacceptable.

However, it is not uncommon to find teachers and universities adding another specification to the plagiarism section of their policy manual. ‘Self-plagiarism’ is also considered intolerable in many classrooms and campuses nationwide.

Apparently, reusing essays and homework that you’ve previously written is also a form of academic dishonesty, and can result in the same severe repercussions as stealing another person’s words entirely. This is a policy that has never made sense to me.

What’s dishonest about submitting homework from a previous course to fulfill the requirements for my current class? Doing the assignment again would be redundant, considering I’ve already done the same thing before. And if I did poorly on the assignment earlier, my past professor’s corrections would give me the opportunity to improve my grade this time around. Either way, I’ve learned what I needed to learn.

The same concept can be turned on many of my former instructors. I can name at least six teachers I’ve had in the past two years that reuse their PowerPoint’s every semester. But if these professors had followed their own self-plagiarism guidelines, they wouldn’t be able to use the same lesson plans from year-to-year because they’ve already used it for another class. Reconstructing the same lecture every year would seem unreasonable. I view repetitive curriculums the same way.

According to Ori.gov, the website for the Office of Research Integrity, the idea of self-plagiarism was created so that scholars couldn’t submit their essays or works to more than one different publication. If scholars did do so, crediting or acknowledging that they had already previously published it somewhere else was mandatory in order to avoid issues with copyright infringement.

There is no copyright infringement associated with homework. If you’ve already done the work for something, and it is 100 percent your work, it seems silly to go out of your way and do the same thing over again.

If teachers don’t want us to reuse an assignment, they shouldn’t assign us redundant coursework.