Collaboration Policy

Note: Projects are a shared responsiblity and all project members will incur any penalties for cheating

We encourage you to ask other students in this semester's course about the concepts, algorithms, or approaches needed to do the project assignments; both giving and taking advice will help you to learn. However, what you turn in must be your own, or for projects, your group's own work; copying other people's code, solution sets, or from any other sources, including online sources, is strictly prohibited. The project assignments must be the work of the students turning them in. We will punish transgressors severely.

Examples of acceptable collaboration between students in different project groups in this semester's course:

Explaining a concept to another student, or asking another student to explain a concept to you
Discussing various algorithms or approaches for project components
Discussing testing strategies and approaches
Searching online for algorithms or implementations of generic (non-project-specific) abstractions (e.g., searching for various implementations of a hash table)
Helping another student debug their code (note that it is not acceptable to give that student code solutions)

Examples of unacceptable collaboration:

Looking at code from a different group's project -- this includes looking at online code from prior semesters or other institutions
Using code from a different group's project -- this includes incorporating online code from prior semesters or other institutions
Looking at or using specific test case instances from a different group's project -- this includes incorporating online code from prior semesters or other institutions
Searching online for specific implementations of project abstractions or functions

Important:

We use an automated system for detecting cheating: it performs a pairwise comparison of all project submissions with all others for this class, for prior semester classes, and for various online repositories. The system reports any suspicious similarities. The TAs and/or instructor will check any such similarities. If two assignments are determined to be obviously very similar (i.e., we believe that they were done together or one was copied from the other), then the course grade for all the students involved in the incident will be reduced by one letter grade for the first offense, and to an F for the second offense. ("All" means both the copy-er and the copy-ee). The letter grade for that assignment will also be reduced to 0. The reduction in grade will be taken without discussion or warning; the first notice you will receive may be a letter indicating the penalty. In addition, for every instance, a letter to the Office of Student Conduct will be attached to your permanent record, and a copy will be placed in the CS division office. More serious cases of cheating, such as copying someone else’s work without their knowledge, cheating on exams, etc. will probably result in the person cheating receiving an F, and having a letter placed in their permanent file in the Office of Student Conduct and in the CS division office. Note that you are responsible for not leaving copies of your assignments lying around and for protecting your files -- do not use public unprotected source code repositories to store your code. You must set up your files and directories so that they are protected from anyone other than members of your group reading them.