Policy on academic honesty

[Please note: this policy has been expanded from the CS 121 policy to include an explicit discussion of pseudo-code. The new text was inspired by the academic honesty policy used in CMSC 23300.]

The University of Chicago has a formal policy on academic honesty that you are expected to adhere to.

In brief, academic dishonesty (handing in someone else’s work as your own, taking existing code and not citing its origin, etc.) will not be tolerated in this course. Depending on the severity of the offense, you risk getting a hefty point penalty or being dismissed altogether from the course. All cases will be referred to the Dean of Students office, which may impose further penalties, including suspension and expulsion.

Under no circumstances should you show (or email) another student your code or post your solution in a publicly-accessible location, such as a web page or social media site. Sending your code to another student does not make you a good friend, it makes you complicit in academic dishonesty. Similarly, making your code available where another student can find and use it puts you in danger of being an unwitting accomplice in a case of academic dishonesty.

Discussing the concepts necessary to complete assignments is certainly allowed (and encouraged). That said, you need to be very careful: discussing an assignment with other students by sketching out code on a whiteboard may cross the line into academic dishonesty (even when using pseudocode). If you do sketch out code on a whiteboard, do not take pictures of the code or use the code verbatim in your own solution. You should instead focus on using the whiteboard discussion as a way to understand the high-level aspects of the problem, and then write your own code from scratch.

If you have discussed parts of an assignment with someone else, make sure to say so in your submission (e.g., in a README file or as a comment at the top of your source code file). If you consulted other sources, please make sure you cite these sources.

If you have any questions regarding what would or would not be considered academic dishonesty in this course, please don’t hesitate to ask any of the instructors.