What shall I do with a student who self-plagiarized large parts of one of his previous work (for another class and another professor) for my own assignment (without stating it)?
Is it fair, considering he obviously chose to work on the same topic but without telling me that it was the case? I guess it happens all the time among students, to "recycle" like this...
Best
This issue has undoubtedly come up before, and your university probably has an explicit policy in place for how to deal with it. For example, Harvard's policy says:
It is the expectation of every course that all work submitted to it will have been done solely for that course. If the same or similar work is to be submitted to any other course, the prior written permission of the instructor must be obtained. If the same or similar work is to be submitted to more than one course during the same term, the prior written permission of all instructors involved must be obtained. A student who submits the same or similar work to more than one course without such prior permission is subject to disciplinary action, and ordinarily will be required to withdraw from the College.
Similarly, Yale's policy says:
Students may not submit the same paper, or substantially the same paper, in more than one course. If topics for two courses coincide, a student must have written permission from both instructors before either combining work on two papers or revising an earlier paper for submission to a new course.
In particular, you should not improvise a response, unless you find out for sure that there is definitely no official policy (strange but possible). If there is a policy, then it will specify what the rules are and how they should be enforced.
My own opinion is that from the standpoint of generating grades, you either deal with plagiarism officially, or not at all. If you don't intend on adjusting grades, you might simply tell the student that this is wrong. If you do plan on issuing penalty, check with your school's academic honest policy, both to make sure that this self plagiarism is well described (it is in mine), and for what your next actions need to be.
You might use this as a cue to beef up the academic honesty sections of your syllabi to include this issue, so it is entirely unambiguous in the future.
It depends on what school you are at, and what the reality is.
It is possible that your school might have a policy on it, but never enforce it.
Talk with other faculty like you what they do. Talk to the chair. Don't email them, talk to them.
I say this with caution after reading that a lot of part-time (adjunct) faculty catch students with major plagiarism, and the school doesn't want to do anything about it.
So, before you do anything official, check unofficially.
If the school offers courses with so much overlap and let's students select them in a way that minimises the time&effort required to graduate you should really be blaming the school and not the students.
