Working Together in CSCI 261

"Your code is like your boyfriend or girlfriend. It's okay to talk about it on an abstract, high level.
But you don't want to go into the specific details, and you certainly don't want to share."
- Professor Pascal Van Hentenryck, Brown University, 1997

The purpose of this policy is to (1) protect the integrity of your hard work and (2) ensure everyone has the opportunity to learn the course material.

• When working on the interactive textbook problems or on lab assignments, students are highly encouraged to work together and help each other as much as possible.
• When working on homework and final project assignments, students are encouraged to discuss assignments at a high level and offer suggestions on how to best accomplish a given task. However, when fingers meet the keyboard, all students must do their own work. Period.
• If a project is assigned as a team project, this policy applies to the team as a whole.

The following policy exists for all CSCI courses (including CSCI 261) in the EECS Department.

1. If the project is an individual effort project¹ you are not allowed to give code you have developed to another student or use code provided by another student. If the project is a group project, you are only allowed to share code with your group members.
2. You are encouraged to discuss homework and final project assignments with other students in the class, as long as the following rules are followed:
   1. You view another student's code only for the purpose of offering/receiving debugging assistance. Students can only give advice on what problems to look for; they cannot debug your code for you. All changes to your code must be made by you.
   2. Your discussion is subject to the empty hands policy , which means you leave the discussion without any record [electronic, mechanical or otherwise] of the discussion.
3. Any material from any outside source such as books, projects, and in particular, from the Web, should be properly referenced and should only be used if specifically allowed for the assignment.
4. To prevent unintended sharing, any code stored in a hosted repository (e.g., on github) must be private. For group projects, your team members may, of course, be collaborators.
5. If you are aware of students violating this policy, you are encouraged to inform the professor of the course. Violating this policy will be treated as an academic misconduct for all students involved. See the Student Handbook for details on academic dishonesty.

Be aware! Any suspected case of plagiarism (copying) will be investigated in this class. Violations of this policy will involve the Associate Dean of Students and may result in an F course grade for all students involved.

¹ Unless otherwise specified in writing, all CSCI 261 homework assignments must be individual efforts.

How Cases of Plagiarism are Found

Developing a program is a creative exercise; just like in art, no two programs will look exactly the same (unless the 'canvas' has been copied). To ensure copying does not exist, homework assignments are checked via an automated system that generates similarity metrics between your work and that of all other students and previous student work in this class. When a high-level of similarity is detected, the course coordinator is notified and investigates the similarity. If plagiarism is evident, the course coordinator begins the process of submitting an Academic Misconduct.

Examples of Academic Misconduct

The following are provided to illustrate examples of academic misconduct.

• Viewing another student's quiz, test, paper, or code while working on your own (rubber-necking).
• Providing another student a copy, electronic or otherwise, of your work.
• Accepting a copy, electronic or otherwise, of another student's work.
• Copying and pasting any component of another student’s work into your own.
• Copying solutions found online or otherwise, and pasting into your own work without proper citation.

These scenarios will always be considered as academic misconduct except when involving an assigned project partner.

Simple Ways to Abide by this Policy

• Don't distribute your work via any means.
• Don't accept a copy of someone else's work.
• Give proper citation if you collaborate with someone, or incorporate code found online.

Citation Examples

Simple add a comment in your program listing. Here are two examples:

// Collaborators: Fran Allen and Steven Hawking
// Code taken from http://stackoverflow.com/foo/bar/baz

ASK if any confusion on this policy.