Assignments must reflect individual work. 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 a copy
of his or
her assignment to another student then both students are
guilty of academic misconduct (the first student helped the second student to
cheat).
Q: What happens if you include someone else's code in your
assignment submission and you do credit the other
person clearly and properly e.g., You use the code from the text book and you include the
following citation: The function listed below displays the list of email
contacts for the user and it was taken from
the book "Python: Essential Reference" by David Beazley.
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 were
supposed to get a marks for writing the code to display a list but
instead you copied someone else's code (and credited this
person) rather than writing
it yourself then you wouldn't get credit for the work.
Q: What is the difference between getting help from someone vs. cheating?
A: If you describe the
process to someone using plain English then you
should be okay because then the person still must figure out how to implement
your generic ideas in a programming language (both of you are handing in separate
submissions). If you simply give your code to a friend then this is not okay,
even if your friend says that he or she will only use your solution as a 'guide'
in order figure out the answer and 'promises' that he or she won't just copy
it into their own program.
|
Okay |
Not okay |
| To
write a loop that counts from one to ten the following steps must be
completed. First a loop control (a variable that stores the values from
one to ten) must be initialized to the starting value (in this case it's
the number one). Next a check must be performed to ensure that the control
includes but does not exceed the last value in the sequence (in this case
it's the number ten). Within the body of the loop the current value of the
loop control should be displayed onscreen so that the program actually
'counts' out the values onscreen. Finally the loop control must be updated
with each pass through the body of the loop. |
i = 1
while (i <= 10):
print "i =", i
i += 1
|
Q: The code that you gave us in lecture or tutorial would be really handy
for our assignments, are we allowed to use it and get credit for the work? (You
should pay especially close attention to this last point with the assignments
in the later part of the term).
A: Yes, unless you are told otherwise you can make use of my sample code (I
usually give the TA's the examples to cover in tutorial).
Just make sure that you clearly indicate where you got it from in your
program documentation as well as indicating which parts of the program
come from class. Don't just include it in your code without
citing the source (in this case it's me) because you will be claiming that
this work is yours when it isn't so you will be guilty of academic
misconduct.
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.