CPSC 203: Academic Misconduct (Cheating)

All assignments except for the third take home assignment must reflect individual work.  This means that each student must demonstrate that he or she can complete the assignment on their own so you cannot copy the work of other students nor can students work in groups.  Any suspected cases of cheating must be forwarded by me onto the Department Head, which may be passed on further to the Office of the Dean of Science and the Department of Student Services and result in penalties such as failing the course or even expulsion from the university.

A few questions and answers to help clarify things:

Q: What exactly constitutes cheating in this course? 
A: It is probably similar to what you have seen in other courses.  Cheating has occurred if you hand in someone else's work as if it were your own (without crediting the other person).   Furthermore if a student knowingly provides his or her assignment to another student  then both students are guilty of academic misconduct (the first student helped the second student to cheat). For example if I included Einstein's formula E=mc² in a paper without indicating where this formula came from then I would be guilty of plagiarizing someone else's work.

Q: What happens if you include someone else's work and you do credit the other person properly e.g., I use a formula from another spreadsheet and you include the following citation:  The formula for calculating the standard deviation came from an Excel spreadsheet created by my Teaching Assistant [and you include the actual TA's name].
A: This will not constitute cheating but since someone else did the work for that section of your assignment you won't get credit for it e.g., if you used someone else's analysis of the statistics from the class survey but you credited the other person then you wouldn't be guilt of misconduct but also you wouldn't receive any credit for that analysis either (so it's somewhat pointless unless you somehow built on and significantly added to that other person's work).

This list of questions only includes things that I thought up as I writing the assignment specifications, if you ever unsure if a particular situation constitutes cheating or not then it is up to you to ask me.