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Important: It will be assumed that you have read the following statement thoroughly. If you have any questions, contact the instructor immediately.

Academic Integrity

Student-teacher relationships are built on trust. For example, students must trust that teachers have made appropriate decisions about the structure and content of the courses they teach, and teachers must trust that the assignments that students turn in are their own performance. Acts that violate this trust undermine the educational process.

Copying, communicating, or using disallowed materials during a quiz or exam is cheating, of course. Students caught cheating on an quiz or exam will receive an F in the course and will be reported to the Dean of Students and/or the Office of Graduate Education as appropriate.

Academic integrity is a difficult issue for written homework and programming assignments. Students naturally want to work together, and it is clear they learn a great deal by doing so. Getting help is often the best way to interpret error messages and find bugs, even for experienced programmers. In response to this, the following rules will be in force for programming assignments:

  • The homework assignments will include problems assigned from the textbook. Students should not not search the internet for solutions or notes published by the textbook authors or other instructors, or for solutions or notes about these problems shared by other students. Any use of these types of materials is considered a violation of Academic Integrity for this course.

  • Students may discuss the problems assigned from the textbook (or other written problems) with each other, but should not collaborate in writing up their solutions to these problems. Solutions should be written individually.

  • Students are allowed to work together in designing algorithms, in interpreting error messages, and in discussing strategies for finding bugs, but NOT in writing code. Students may not share code, may not copy code, and may not discuss code in detail (line-by-line or loop-by-loop).

  • Your homework solutions (written problems and programming problems) should not be published in a public GitHub repository, public DropBox, or any other publicly-accessible location. You are encouraged to use a private repository to backup your work, provided that you are the only one with access. You may share/publish your final project in a public repository -- in fact, you are encouraged to do so!

Students found in violation of this policy for homework assignments will be receive (for the first offense) a 0 on the assignment. Students whose violations are more flagrant will receive a higher penalty. Students caught a second time will receive an F in the course. Each incident will be reported to the Dean of Students and/or Office of Graduate Education as appropriate.

Refer to the The Rensselaer Handbook of Student Rights and Responsibilities and the The Rensselaer Graduate Student Supplement for further discussion of academic dishonesty. Note that: "Students found in violation of the academic dishonesty policy are prohibited from dropping the course in order to avoid the academic penalty."