CS 1110 - Spring 2020 | Academic Integrity Policy for CS 1110

Labs

You are freely allowed to collaborate with, give help to, and get aid from any other student in this class.

Exams

You must not have outside materials accessible while you work on an exam. You must not copy from the exam of another person. You must not show your exam to another person currently taking the exam or waiting to take the exam. You must not discuss exam questions with another person currently taking the exam or waiting to take the exam.

Assignments

Rationale

In order to learn the material, we expect you to work in groups of one to two (as specified on an individual basis for each assignment) and complete the assignments by your own efforts. It's fine to get certain types of advice from other people, but you should develop your own code. We do not want you to get "help" by seeing or hearing another student's solution, and we do not want you to do the assignment in a large team and then hand in several copies of the resulting code. We give you grades as a recognition you have completed the assignment in the way we asked.

So that students receive the maximum benefit of working on the assignments themselves, we also prohibit providing unauthorized aid to other students. While it may seem that showing someone your code is helping them, we view this as actually harmful to them, and providing unauthorized assistance is a violation of Cornell's Code of Academic Integrity (see I.B.2 of the Code).

Given the above, here are the course rules, where "you" means you and, if there is one, your one CMS-registered group partner:

(1) You must never look at, access or possess any portion of another group's code in any form. (This includes code written on a whiteboard.)

(2) You must never show or share any portion of your code in any form to anyone except a member of the course staff.

(3) You must not ask for or use solutions from outside sources; for example, on online services like StackOverflow.

(4) You should specifically acknowledge by name all help you received, whether or not it was "legal" according to rules (1)-(3) above. This is also known as "citing your sources". Exception: you do not need to acknowledge the course staff (although we appreciate it if you do!).

(5) If we find an academic integrity violation in which you have taken credit for work that is not yours, we generally at least assign a negative score for the relevant parts of the affected work: it is thus better to not complete a piece of an assignment of work (meaning a 0 on that part) than to submit it under fraudulent circumstances (meaning a negative score). When in doubt, please ask beforehand!

The more general principles

One of the key things to understand about programming, and computer science in general, is that it is a writing-heavy discipline. When you create a computer program, you are writing a document, just like you write documents in an English class (or any class that involves essays). Therefore, many of the same rules that apply to writing essays also apply to computer programs, particularly regarding plagiarism.

Plagiarism is essentially a form of fraud. Every time you hand in a program in this course, you are representing it as the work of the stated authors (i.e., the members of the CMS group who submitted it, which should be the same as the people listed as the authors in the header of the submitted code) subject to any exceptions that are clearly stated in the submission itself. To avoid committing plagiarism, simply be sure always to accurately credit your sources. To do otherwise is to commit fraud by claiming credit for the ideas and efforts of others.

Integrity is about being honest about the sources of the work you are handing in. Grades on course assignments, on the other hand, are about you showing us what you have learned.

If you turn in someone else's work for course credit, and forthrightly acknowledge you are doing so, you are not acting dishonestly and are not violating academic integrity, but that also does not show us you have learned anything. Thus, you may not receive grading credit, but you would not undergo academic integrity hearings.

If, on the other hand, you violate academic integrity by claiming someone else's work as yours or by giving unauthorized help, then, the academic integrity hearing process will be triggered, which can incur both grade penalties and storage of records by your College.

Getting Help on Assignments: Appropriate vs. Unauthorized

Assignments can be done in official partnerships, which are created/registered on CMS. Your partner can help you work on the assignment with no limitations.
- The "group divorce" scenario: If you and your partner stop collaborating and submit as individuals, your code will look similar so you need to mention this in the comments at the top of your file, a la "I was originally working with Mary. We worked together on the testing code. However, we stopped working together after the testing code, because I wanted to work with Joe instead. Joe and I worked on the widget class by ourselves."
You are free to come to the instructor or any course staff for help. This help can include questions about the assignment, help reading error messages, and hints about where to go if you are stuck.
Looking at or receiving code from someone else is a major violation. Even talking about code (without sharing files) is a problem, since your discussion will likely alter your code in ways that suggest it has a single rather than unique authors. Remember: once you have seen someone's solution it is nearly impossible to come up with your own, unique version.
Getting help from anyone else -- a current or former student of CS 1110 or someone outside Cornell entirely -- is not allowed. Asking for clarification is not considered a violation, but those types of questions should always be directed to the course staff, as only they know the official answers.
It is not okay to copy files from online sources. Some of the earlier assignments do not change too much, and you might find versions online. But if you do that, we can easily detect this, because we also have access to these online solutions.
Programming forums like Stack Overflow are acceptable resources for basic Python questions. However, using Stack Overflow to aid you on specific parts of an assignment is not allowed. If you are unsure of whether you have used an online forum in a way that counts as unauthorized assistance, your best option is to cite the source, just like you would cite a source in a paper. "I wrote this function after looking at the following page on Stack Overflow: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9189172/python-string-replace." Citing a source does not mean that you can receive credit for the work (since you may not in fact have done it), but it does mean you have not committed fraud.

Giving Unauthorized Help on Assignments

Intentionally showing your code to or sharing it with another student is not allowed. This includes posting your code online or on Piazza so that another student can freely copy it. (If you want to use Git with your partner, you should use the Cornell GitHub, which allows you to create a private repository. Other versions of GitHub may make your private repository public without your knowledge.)
Unintentionally sharing answers with another student is not allowed. This includes emailing it to a friend so that they can print it for you, leaving a copy of your homework lying around the computer lab, etc. We ask that you do due diligence to protect yourself and others.
Talking about the assignment in any way that could influence another's implementation or approach is also not allowed. ("Are you done with Assignment 1?" is fine. "How did you implement Assignment 1?" is not.) Once grades have been posted, you are free to discuss.