| home page - news - course info - lectures - assignments - how to succeed - what to avoid - references - Mike Jacobson |
| What to Avoid |
All work that you submit must indicate your skills and your understanding of material. Anyone else’s work must be clearly identified as such.
You must not interfere with other students’ opportunities to learn.
Most of the information that follows expands on the above.
It is the instructor’s job to make information about student misconduct available to you — but it is your job to read this information and to make sure that you understand it. Please contact the instructor if you have any questions about this information.
Student misconduct (cheating, plagiarism, or any other form) is a very serious offence that will be dealt with rigorously in all cases. A single offence may lead to disciplinary probation or suspension or expulsion. The Faculty of Science follows a zero tolerance policy regarding dishonesty. Please read the sections of the University Calendar under the heading ``Student Misconduct'' (online here) for additional information.
The University of Calgary has also produced some general material about honesty in academics. It is worth your time to read through this material!
Note that if one student provides help to another student, in a way that violates the following rules, then both students have committed academic misconduct and both students will be penalized.
More specific information about what is, and is not, allowed in CPSC 217 is provided below.
Your work on assignments will probably be split into three stages: Figuring out how to solve the assigned problems, then writing up your solutions, and trying to improve your solutions after you have first written them up. You should allow time to do all three of these things.
Note that you will be asked to give a demo of your assignment solutions to one of the TAs. Part of this demo will involve describing aspects of your solution, which should be easy to do if you have in fact done the work yourself!
Figuring Out How To Solve Problems
Yes, you are allowed to work together with other students in order to figure out how to solve problems on assignments. However, you must state that you did this, and include the names of the students you worked with, in the material you submit for credit.
Yes — you are also allowed to look for and use other reference material that might include solutions for these problems. However, there are rules that you must follow when writing up your solution if other reference material has been used. See item 2, below, for more information about this.
On, the other hand, no — you are not allowed to use newsgroups, message lists, or other mechanisms like this in order to broadcast requests for help on assignment problems to large groups of people (whom you do not necessarily know).
You should also note that it is usually easy, in CPSC 217, for instructors to choose problems that do not have published solutions in easy-to-find places! Furthermore, solving assignment problems on your own instead of finding their solutions elsewhere is generally an effective way to prepare for class tests and the final examination.
Writing Up Your Solutions
It is important that your submitted work shows your understanding of the course material instead of someone else’s.
If you have discussed a problem on an assignment with other students (or anyone else) or if you found material elsewhere that was helpful, then your sources must must be identified as “references,” even if you have not copied anything from these sources directly into your own solution.
Furthermore, if you are not copying material directly into your own solution then you should not have this other material anywhere near you when you write up your solution — and you should wait a significant amount of time (at least an hour or two) after you last looked at this material before writing your own solution down.
On the other hand, material that you do copy must be easy to identify: It must be possible for a reader of your work to see, just by a single glance, that it is different from the material that you wrote yourself. The source of the copied material must be listed as well.
Note that if you have found a significant part of a solution elsewhere and have copied it as described above, then the mark that you will receive will not be as high as it would have been if you had solved the problem on your own. You will probably not be as well prepared for class tests as you would be if you had solved the problem on your own, either. However, you may still receive partial credit (depending on what other material you have included and how you have used it) and, at least, you will not be committing “academic misconduct” if you cite other peoples” work when using it.
Note, by the way, that these rules (about the identification of other peoples’ material) apply to all material that you did not produce yourself — including material in the text book, and material provided by either the instructor or a teaching assistant.
These rules also apply to programs and documentation that you write to solve programming problems, as well as the written material that you submit as solutions for all other problems.
Improving Your Solutions
No, you may not show your solution (after having started to write it up) to any other student who is currently taking CPSC 217, even though this is allowed in some other situations: You are both trying to solve the same problem, and there is too great a risk that your work, or the other student”s work, will be compromised if another student looks at what you have written at this point!
No, you may not ask any CPSC 217 teaching assistant to proofread your solution, either. Teaching assistants are not paid for this, so it is not fair to ask this of them.
Yes, you may show your solution to someone else who is not currently a student in CPSC 217. In particular, the course instructor will definitely be willing to look at your work work before you submit it, if you bring it to them during their office hours for this course.
It is perfectly acceptable for other people (besides other CPSC 217 students and teaching assistants) to look for and tell you about bugs in your code, logical errors in your arguments, incorrect applications of techniques, problems with your writing, or other kinds of problems with what you have written. However, it is not acceptable for these people to correct the errors or to write any part of your solution for you!
Note that if you do show your work to someone else and they comment on it, then you must include the names of these people and describe the help they provided in the work that you submit, too.
You should show this page to anyone whose help you request before you show them your work, in order to be sure that they know what is allowed.
See the material about honesty in academics that is mentioned above, and follow the link for “Other Misconduct” in the menu on the left side of the main page on that topic. The general information about tests that is included there applies to tests in CPSC 217.
Better Safe Than Sorry: Please do not assume that something is allowed (if there is any doubt about this, at all) if it is not discussed here. Instead, please contact the instructor if you think that something might be allowed but are not certain about this.
|
This page last modified:
http://www.cpsc.ucalgary.ca/~jacobs/cpsc217/W10/what_to_avoid.html |