CS 3723
Programming Languages  
Fall 2013
  Academic Dishonesty  

Academic Dishonesty:
  1. If you work as one part of a team of two (and if you both attend the same session for the particular recitation at issue), then you will submit one file for the two of you. (Don't forget to put both names at the top.) Otherwise you must work alone.

    In either case, each recitation must be your own individual work or the work of the two of you on the team. It is permissible to talk with other students about recitations, or to get help from the instructor, the teaching assistant, or a tutor, but you must not use complete code or full answers from other students or supply such code or answers to other students. It is completely unacceptable to exchange machine-readable portions of recitations. Anyone providing such material is just as much at fault as a person using it. There will be significant penalties for submitting work that has been copied from someone else, and the same penalties for allowing someone else to copy your work. It is even worse if you make sneaky editing changes throughout a copied file to make it look less like a copy. You should be aware that several strange and identical incorrect answers will stand out among all the correct ones.

  2. You should also realize that the recitation files you submit will remain indefinitely and can be examined at any future time, even after the semester is over. (See Plagiarism by Student Programmers for a discussion of copying by students.)

  3. Of course you can use the code I supply for the course. In fact you can use any source at all for your code as long as you give a clear and prominent citation of where it came from. In that case the credit will depend on how much you wrote yourself. No citation is needed for the code I have supplied. Remember, though, that you only learn from the code you write yourself.

  4. On the Internet you can find an answer to nearly any question, and code for almost any algorithm. For example, Java source for most algorithms is available here. You should realize, though, that such online code is usually fancy and highly refined -- it practically shouts out that it was not written by a student for a course.

    Because there is so much code online, I will often supply code as a starting point, and give specific details about the additions you should make. You are allowed to modify (or even rewrite) the code I supply, but complex additions that I didn't ask for will look suspicious. Supplied code will be in C and in Java. I will try to supply straightforward code, without fancy generalized features.

  5. I taught this course last semester (Spring 2013). Some recitations will be similar to the previous ones. I will make various changes, large and small. If your code fits the previous semester's requirements exactly, rather than those of this semester, that will look suspicious.

Revision date: 2013-07-03. (Please use ISO 8601, the International Standard.)