Excellent point. That should be true in most colleges. But it probably isn’t. There could also be an issue with transferred in courses. Especially in online education. Come to think of it, I think that was where I was having problems – between an elective from another university.

That brings up an interesting question, though: isn’t there something wrong with the academic program if a student is able to use the same paper for multiple courses? Shouldn’t there always be some sort of adaptation or elaboration required as the student progresses from course to course? And if there is — it doesn’t seem so wrong to me for that student to take what they’ve already done and build upon it.

My animation courses often encouraged that practice: I’d write a story in one class, storyboard it in another, design the characters and sets in a third, etc, until I had a fully-developed animated short. It seems to me that the same model would apply well to the instructional design program at Capella, and probably any number of additional programs.

As for reusing previous work, Capella University treats it as cheating. I ran into a case this quarter where I wanted to take a project from a previous course and develop it further for another (by taking a proposal for a course and fleshing it out into storyboards and budgets), but even that seemed to fall under cheating in their guidelines. I understand the principle behind the rule, but I think we could make legitimate arguments in support of both our cases.