The newly proposed change to the Honor Code prohibiting self-plagiarism is a necessary addition that would promote academic integrity and clarify a gray area of the code.
In order to be enacted, the legislation must clear a Student Congress vote and a Faculty Executive Committee review before being sent to the Faculty Council and Chancellor Carol Folt.
All parties would do well to sign off on this proposal, as it eliminates an important omission from the Honor Code.
Self-plagiarism, while at face value not as severe an act of academic dishonesty as many others, is still something that should be eradicated from the UNC culture in the few places that it exists.
Assignments that could be targets of self-plagiarism often have broad and open-ended prompts that give students relatively free reign to approach the paper in a variety of ways.
With such highly qualified students at the University, it isn’t asking much to require students to explore multiple angles when approaching a similar issue. In fact, pushing students out of the comfort zones established by previous work actually serves to breed a more holistic and complex understanding of course topics.
This is not a radical idea. Many institutions, such as Purdue University and Stanford University, already incorporate self-plagiarism into their honor codes or equivalent academic standards.
Granted, professors should be allowed to make exceptions for certain assignments at their discretion. Professors often assign work that is intended to be built upon over a semester. Requiring students to reword these assignments merely to avoid plagiarism would be counterproductive. Apart from these limited exceptions, however, original work should be the norm.
