CS 480

Policies

Please be advised that there will be a 5% penalty per day in case of late submission for the homework assignments.

While collaboration among students is encouraged, cheating/plagiarism is not tolerated and will get you an automatic F in the class and could be reported to Student Conduct if it is severe enough.

Here's more clarification of the above [the foll. text adapted from Sam Buss's class at UCSD, and it fits our requirements pretty well]:

Programming projects are individual projects. One exception to this is that the final projects can be joint if (a) you get approval from the professor ahead of time, and (b) the duties can be split among the member of the project team in such a way that each team member is working on an independent portion of the code. The latter restriction is to establish accountability for grading purposes, and to ensure that each member of the project team has well defined responsibilities..

Basic principles:

You are expected to do your own work, program your own projects, and understand all aspects of your program.
You may seek information and help from fellow students, TA, the instructor, outside books, resources on the Internet, etc.
Fellow students or friends may help you debug your code, suggest fixes, etc. For debugging, you must debug the code yourself while your helper makes suggestions looking over your shoulder. If your helper suggests fixes, you must understand them and you must type them yourself.
It is acceptable to get this kind of help (as mentioned above) on localized parts of your code. This should not be used for large portions of your code.
Any kind of help from TAs or the instructor is permitted.
For resources such as books or web pages - you may not pass off other's work as your own. Significant help from such resources should be acknowledged by inserting comments in your code, AND discussing it with the TA during the grading session. Again, this kind of help from these resources should only provide localized parts of your code; it should not be used for large portions of your code. If the help from these resources is too substantial, it is not allowed.
Completely disallowed: turning in other's work as your own, copying other student's code, borrowing substantial pieces of code from any source.

Consequences of willful violations of the above guidelines are likely to be as severe as is allowed and reasonable, quite possibly including referral to the appropriate Dean.

Resources on the Student Judicial Affairs Web site include two student-oriented publications in both viewable and printable forms (look in Resources -> Academic Resources):

1. "Guide to Avoiding Plagiarism" addresses issues of paraphrasing, quotations and citations in written assignments, drawing heavily upon materials used in the university's Writing Program.

2. "Understanding and Avoiding Academic Dishonesty" addresses more general issues of academic integrity, including guidelines for adhering to standards concerning examinations and unauthorized collaboration.

The student handbook contains the university's Student Conduct Code and other student-related policies.