Discussing the assignment requirements with others is a reasonable thing to do, and an excellent way to learn.
computer science
Description
Collaboration
Discussing the assignment requirements with others is a reasonable thing to do, and an excellent way to learn. However, the work you hand-in must ultimately be your work. This is essential for you to benefit from the learning experience, and for the instructors and TAs to grade you fairly. Handing in work that is not your original work, but is represented as such, is plagiarism and academic misconduct. Penalties for academic misconduct are outlined in the university calendar.
Here are some tips to avoid plagiarism in your programming assignments
1. Cite all sources of code that you hand-in that are not your original work. You can put the citation into comments in your program. For example, if you find and use code found on a web site, include a comment that says, for example: # the following code is from https://www.quackit.com/python/tutorial/python_hello_world.cfm. Use the complete URL so that the marker can check the source.
2. Citing sources avoids accusations of plagiarism and penalties for academic misconduct. However, you may still get a low grade if you submit code that is not primarily developed by yourself.
3. Discuss and share ideas with other programmers as much as you like, but make sure that when you write your code that it is your own. A good rule of thumb is to wait 20 minutes after talking with somebody before writing your code. If you exchange code with another student, write code while discussing it with a fellow student, or copy code from another person’s console, then this code is not yours.
4. Collaborative coding is strictly prohibited. Your assignment submission must be strictly your code. Discussing anything beyond assignment requirements and ideas is a strictly forbidden form of collaboration. This includes sharing code, discussing code itself, or modelling code after another student's algorithm. You can not use (even with citation) another student’s code.
5. We will be looking for plagiarism in all code submissions, possibly using automated software
designed for the task. For example, see Measures of Software Similarity (MOSS -
https://theory.stanford.edu/~aiken/moss/).
