Student turns in same paper for two classes - What do you think penalty should be?

[Hunt]

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t’s ALWAYS harder and more time-consuming to grade papers than to grade exams, because grading papers requires so much more individuation and attention to detail. The only reason a professor would assign a paper in lieu of, or in addition to, an exam is the belief that the paper serves a valuable pedagogical purpose or purposes, like those outlined above. And those pedagogical purposes are utterly defeated by re-submission of old work. That makes re-submission an inherently fraudulent practice.

I think the first and last sentences of this are telling. I can understand that professors feel they are being treated with disrespect if they are given old work, and they have to spend all that time grading it. Of course, all of those pedagogical purposes–except maybe for “exercising”–could be met by writing the same paper for two classes. But bclintock, for you to refer to this practice as “fraudulent” suggests that you think you, the professor, are being defrauded. I just don’t think you’ve made the case that there’s anything “fraudulent” about this, unless it’s clearly forbidden and somebody does it anyway.</p>

<p>By the way, how would you respond to the example I gave above–you assign a paper on Joyce, and a student tells you he wrote a paper on Joyce on his own over the summer. Would you accept it, or would you make him write a new paper?</p>