Okay To Shop Around?

[ham]

I read this in a doctoral candidate's thesis:

This is to certify that I am responsible for the work submitted in this thesis, that the original work is my own except as specified in acknowledgements, and that neither the thesis nor the original work contained therein has been submitted to this or any other institution for a higher degree. (Emphasis added.)

Intriguing. The university (a top 15 UK uni), prohibits a student from submitting work that had previously been submitted towards a degree. So, if someone submitted his work to a school for a degree and later submitted the same work to another school for a degree, wouldn't that be unethical? It sure seems so.

Technically, everybody's a plagiarist, then...much as the scholar who carves eleventeen articles for peer-review publication nearly verbatim from his doctoral thesis.
But I think all they mean is that "the package" cannot come ready made, or you may use whatever body of work you see fit as long as you "rework it" to look somewhat different.
That's not speculation but actual exchanges I had with one UK university: original in the sense it doesn't come verbatim from another source.
With all intellectuals droning incessantly on the same subject, it'd be foolish to expect absolute originality at every turn.
If you crafted a couple killer paragraphs on a given assumption using say 4 sources...well, that's it...then you just change "believe" into "argue" etc.