<p>The case of a double submission being ‘fraudulent’ relies less on the specific professors being defrauded but rather that the student is defrauding the academic record by simply not doing the amount of work required.</p>
<p>If one thinks that such an approach is ‘clever’ or ‘imaginative’ then perhaps it is in the way exotic financial instruments on Wall Street are clever and imaginative but I would suggest there are many ways to ‘play’ the system when the student leaves college and gets a job.</p>
<p>Perhaps one could look at it this way…?</p>
<p>It would be extremely rare that two identical questions were offered in two separate courses and that a single unedited paper could be successfully submitted to cover both courses, so what we are probably discussing are two papers with similar subject matters and themes. If this is the case then the student hasn’t even taken the time to edit, re-jig, alter, adapt, revise, and rephrase the original piece and at best the student has simply cut and pasted large sections whole, to the extent that the 2 submissions are not identical but easily identifiable as being derived from a single piece of work.</p>
<p>If you don’t want to censure the student for the double submission, perhaps you should censure the student for being too stupid to execute what should be a fairly simple time saving short cut.</p>
<p>Lets face it, with the real work having been done in the first paper, the second paper required less planning, little research, obviously less critical thinking and less actual writing time… But this student was too lazy to even edit and revise the second submission so as to make it discernible from the first.</p>
<p>Don’t punish the student for academic dishonesty then, punish the student for rank stupidity instead.</p>