Academic Dishonesty (and Legitimate Collaborations)

It shouldn't be necessary to mention this in an advanced class, but the issue has come up in the past so I feel that I should state my policies clearly up front.

Dishonest behaviors, including but not limited to plagiarism, copying of another student's work/code (or providing your own to another), group consultation on individual projects or work, etc., will not be tolerated. Specific types of cheating include, but are not limited to:

• Copying code from another person.
• Copying code from the Internet or another source.
• Reading someone's paper program listings (e.g., discarded in the trash).
• Allowing another person to copy your code.
• Leaving your class files world readable. (!)
• Copying/plagiarizing text from another person, the Internet, a published work, etc.
• Discussing program design with another person.
• Discussing proofs or mathematical methods with another person.
• Attempting to steal another person's code (e.g., by cracking, password sniffing, etc.)
• Failing to document the use of external Java libraries (i.e., libraries other than those included with the JDK).
• Violating copyright on external libraries.
• Violations of the University policy on acceptable computer use (included in this document by reference from http://www.unm.edu/~ubppm/ubppmanual/2500.htm).

For the group project, substitute ``group'' for ``person'' above.

If you have any question of whether a behavior is acceptable, please ask me about it before you do it.

My general feeling is that being caught cheating should be more painful than not having done the assignment at all. Therefore, I will generally at least assign a negative penalty equal to the full value of the assignment if I discover someone cheating on an assignment (though I reserve the right to assess a greater penalty, including outright failure from the entire course). I.e., if an assignment is worth 10% of the final grade, the individual would receive not zero credit for the assignment, but -10%. In cases where multiple students were involved, all students aware of the activity will be punished. And, of course, if you're clever enough not to get caught, then you're clever enough not to need to cheat in the first place.

I do not issue ``Withdraw-Pass'' to students I've found cheating. If you're caught cheating, you either complete the course, or take a ``Withdraw-Fail''.

That said, this is an upper-division course, you're all adults, and design is a fundamentally much more social activity than people usually give it credit for. So there are aspects of the class in which you're encouraged to talk to one another:

• The reading assignments are intended to be group discussion work. I encourage (and even require) you to discuss them among yourselves before coming to class. The corresponding report is also a group assignment, and should include the names of everyone who participated. (Please, if you didn't participate in developing critique, don't put your name on it.)
• The group project is, obviously, group work - you're expected to share design, code, work, etc. with the other members of your group.
• You may discuss the problems but not the solutions. E.g., you can discuss the project specification, what's being asked for, etc., but not the design of a project, specific data flows, etc.
• You may discuss coding style, grammar, spelling, etc., with other people.
• You may discuss algorithms/data structures in general (e.g., ``Help me understand how partition works in QuickSort()'', but not the role of such things in specific projects.
• You may discuss how the tools (e.g., emacs, javac, CVS, etc.) work, including limited amounts of debugging assistance (``What the heck does javac mean when it says `Foo.java:192: non-static method foo() cannot be referenced from a static context'?'')

Exams are, of course, completely individual work.

Most importantly, if you have a question about whether some specific collaboration is permissible, please ask me before you do it.