Timeline for I unintentionally self-plagiarized in my graduate courses last semester and just realized, what should I do?
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
13 events
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| Mar 16, 2023 at 13:30 | comment | added | fedja | @penelope In general we just view "plagiarism" from different perspectives. For me it is purely about relations between people with the underlying idea that everybody should get due credit for their work. The mathematical theorems do not care about any credit or work. They are just "facts of life". Reprinted 100 times (or not discovered at all), each of them remains just a single theorem in a timeless Platonic word. As to the people, the only thing that is unethical is trying to pass something done 20 years ago for the work done in the last year. But that is not "plagiarism", just "cheating" | |
| Mar 16, 2023 at 13:19 | comment | added | fedja | @penelope Well, are we ever sure that we do know the actual history of any idea? All we can say is where we learned it from and what traces of it we could find in the literature after some decent but by no means exhaustive search. The "when", at least in mathematics, is a tricky thing too: the chronological timeline here is more or less an irrelevant anthropomorphic notion. What really matters is the logical dependence of ideas. What is really useful for communication is this logical context. Specifying whether something was done in 1816 or 2016 and by J. Smith or S. Jones adds very little. | |
| Mar 11, 2023 at 12:41 | comment | added | Michael Mior | @Falco That's assuming you have a correct understanding of the intent of the rule, which is a difficult assumption to make in general. | |
| Mar 10, 2023 at 14:48 | comment | added | penelope | "self-plagiarism is an oxymoron" -- I would disagree on this point. At least one of the goals of proper referencing is to be able to trade ideas to their origins: who and when presented the idea/result first. So, while omitting a reference to your own, older work, does not missattribute somebody else's work as your own, it does "hide" the history of the idea: in which context was it first presented and when. | |
| Mar 10, 2023 at 9:50 | comment | added | Falco | One Example: There is a rule that mobile phones need to be turned off during exams. Clearly intended to prevent cheating. A student with anxiety may need his phone to be turned on in his pocket, because he fears missing a call from a sick family member and may not be able to focus on the exam at all if the phone is turned off. I think in this case it would be ethical for him to keep the phone turned on hidden in his pocket, even if it is in clear violation of the rule (and assuming the rule does not specify exceptions for such cases). | |
| Mar 10, 2023 at 9:46 | comment | added | Falco | @MichaelMior I think in general violating a rule, while upholding the spirit of the rule (assuming the spirit of the rule is morally sound) is often even more ethically sound than the other way around. Since the "spirit of the rule" or intent of the collective body representing the benefactors for this rule is often very hard to ascertain, our judiciary systems usually focus on upholding the "law as written". But ethically I think breaking a "rule as written" is not ethically problematic in of itself. | |
| Mar 10, 2023 at 9:42 | comment | added | Falco | @Stef fair enough. But I would argue that by doing the work he did learn how to do it. Another example: Imagine I was bored last semester and did some book-summaries just for fun in my free time. Now I get the homework to do exactly this book-review as an assignment - would you expect me to do it again, or would it be ethical to just use the stuff I already did for another reason (in my free time because I was bored?) Both cases are analogous because I did the work and learned by doing it, just for another reason. | |
| Mar 9, 2023 at 18:45 | comment | added | Michael Mior | @Falco While perhaps you could arguably fulfill the goal of the assignment while violating rules, I think the violation of rules is still ethically problematic. | |
| Mar 9, 2023 at 18:32 | comment | added | ScottishTapWater | @Stef - If the goal is to make them learn, then presumably that homework doesn't factor into their final grade? A grade should reflect what the student knows at the end, not what their personal learning curve looks like | |
| Mar 9, 2023 at 15:50 | comment | added | Stef | @Falco I disagree. When I give homework to the students, the goal is never to grade them. The goal is to make them learn stuff. | |
| Mar 9, 2023 at 14:28 | comment | added | Falco | For the ethical part the question should be: What was the goal of the assignment? Usually it is not to create some work with any usefulness, but rather to verify the abilities of the student. The work itself is usually only marked by the professor and afterwards thrown away/never read again by anybody. So if the intent of the professors was primarily to check is abilities, he has done nothing wrong ethically. | |
| Mar 9, 2023 at 12:02 | comment | added | MJeffryes | It is ridiculous to expect that you will come up with two completely disjoint in terms of ideas, conclusions, trains of thought, or even passages texts when writing two reviews for the same book sounds like OP chose the books to review and realised they could just choose the same book for both. Had they known the rules, they should have chosen different books. So, I see no ethical problem with submitting the same work for two classes if it can satisfy all requirements and if it is your own But this is not the rule at OP's and many other institutions. | |
| Mar 9, 2023 at 3:43 | history | answered | fedja | CC BY-SA 4.0 |