CS 473: Academic Integrity

This policy statement is unfortunately necessary, thanks to the actions of a tiny minority of students. If you have any questions or concerns, please don't hesitate to ask in lecture, during office hours, on the course newsgroup, or by email.

Our expectations

Each student (or homework group) must write their own homework solutions, in their own words, and must properly credit all sources. We strongly encourage students to use any printed, online, or living resource at their disposal to help solve the homework problems, but you must cite your sources.

This is the same ethical standard that researchers are expected to follow in their formal publications. For comparison, see the guidelines published by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the American Physical Society (APS), the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Citing your sources will not lower your homework grade.

Avoiding plagiarism is really very simple: Never present someone else's words or ideas as your own.

See Article 1, Part 4 of the UIUC student code (http://www.admin.uiuc.edu/policy/code/article_1/a1_1-402.html) for more examples and information. If you have any doubt about whether something constitutes plagiarism, talk to Chandra or the TAs, and err on the side of caution.

There are much more serious ways to violate the university's academic integrity policies, such as collaborating with or copying from another student during an exam, hiring an impostor to write homework solutions or take exams for you, changing the answers on a graded homework or exam before asking for a regrade, falsely claiming to have submitted a homework or taken an exam, and modifying or destroying other students' graded work. Hopefully you already know not to do anything that stupid!


Penalties

Violations of academic integrity will not be tolerated.

By department and university policy, all academic integrity cases are reported to the CS department, to the student's home college, and to the Senate Committee on Student Discipline. Multiple offenses, even in different classes, can result (and have resulted) in suspension or expulsion. These penalties are consistent with the CS department's recommendations.

Our high expectations for graduate students extend to issues of academic integrity. Any cheating offense by a graduate student will be reported to the student's advisor, and a notice will be entered into their file. For PhD students, this notice will be visible to the student's qual, prelim, and thesis committees, and to all faculty in the student's research area during the annual student evaluations. Several computer science faculty members have publicly stated that they would refuse to advise or serve on a committee for a MS or PhD student who has committed even a single cheating offense, no matter how minor or how far in the past. If you cheat, you are signing your own academic death warrant.

Except for Homework 0, groups of up to three people are allowed to submit a single solution for each homework. Every member of the group receives credit for the entire assignment. That means every member of the group is responsible for the entire assignment. If a submitted homework contains plagiarized material, every member of the group will be given the same penalty. Again, this is the same standard that is applied to coauthors of research papers. If you cheat, you are not only endangering your grade, and possibly your academic career, but your colleagues' as well.

Regardless of whether it constitutes plagiarism, or whether you get caught, getting too much help on your homework will hurt your final grade. If you don't learn how to solve algorithmic problems on your own, you will perform poorly on the (closed-book, closed-notes) exams, which make up 70% of your final course average. Several students with homework averages over 90% have failed the course.


Group work

Except for Homework 0, groups of up to three people are allowed to submit a single solution for each homework. Every member of the group receives the same grade and the same credit for the entire assignment. That means every member of the group is responsible for the entire assignment.

Group solutions must represent an honest collaborative effort by all members of the group. In particular, groups must not delegate one problem to each group member; only the students who actively worked on a problem may add their names to the solution. At a minimum, you must read, understand, and approve anything submitted with your name on it. Allowing someone else to add your name to a solution to which you made no contribution is plagiarism. This does not mean that every student in a group must contribute good ideas or must help in the actual writing of every group solution. Asking "stupid" questions, proposing bad ideas, shooting down bad ideas, working out examples (even if they don't appear in the solution), uncovering bugs, and even just acting as a sounding board for other group members are all legitimate contributions.

If a submitted homework contains plagiarized material, we will separately determine each student's culpability (if any) and penalty (if any), in accordance with Student Code. By default, every member of the homework group will be given the same penalty. (Again, this is the same standard that is applied to coauthors of research papers.) If you cheat, you are not only endangering your grade, and possibly your academic career, but your colleagues’ as well.

As illustrations, consider the following scenarios. All scenarios involve a group of three students (A, B, and C) collaborating on a three-problem homework set, who argee in advance that each student will write up and submit the solution for one problem — A will handle problem 1, B will handle problem 2, and C will handle problem 3 — with all three names at the top. Variants of all these scenarios have actually happened. Yes, even the last two.


Warning signs

Almost every instance of plagiarism I've ever seen has been motivated by a combination of desperation and an expectation that cheating is tolerated.