CPSC 203: Allowable Collaboration Vs. Academic Misconduct

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. To avoid potential cases of misconduct students should not show or otherwise provide their assignment solutions to their classmates. It is a faculty requirement that any suspected cases of cheating must be forwarded by me onto the Department Head, which may be passed on further to the Department of Computer Science and the Office of the Dean of Science resulting in penalties such as failing the course or even expulsion from the university.

A few questions and answers to help clarify things:

Q: What 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 graded work 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 work and you do credit the other person properly (this doesn't apply to your classmates, recall that you are not to see the assignment work of other students) e.g., You use the example from a text book (including any recommended course textbooks) and you include the following citation:  The function (listed below) for opening and reading from a file was taken in it's entirety from the book "The Tao of file systems" by James Tam.  You are required to cite all sources including lecture and tutorial notes (if applicable). If you don't cite the source then you have made the strong implication that this work is yours when it isn't so you will be guilty of academic misconduct.
A: This will not constitute cheating because you clearly indicated that the work was not your own but since someone else did the work for that section of your assignment you won't get credit for that part of the assignment. You could get marks for the other parts of the assignment that you wrote yourself. The crediting of other's people work must be very specific and clear because your marker needs to be able to unambiguously determine which parts of your assignment did you complete and which parts came from an outside source.

Q: I have hired a tutor for this class can I get help on an assignment from this person?
A: Tutors can be useful helping to clarify concepts (e.g. what is 'loop' in programming) or showing you where to find features in Office or how they work. The problem with going over an assignment with a tutor is that the 'help' ends up with the tutor completing some or all of the assignment for you. This is similar to getting a solution from a class mate because you didn't do the work so it is likely that it will be ruled as 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. For you reference here is the brief discussion on academic misconduct provide by the [university].