COMPSCI 250: Introduction to Computation

Marius Minea and Ghazaleh Parvini

Fall 2020

Academic Honesty and Collaboration Policy

As members of the College of Information and Computer Sciences at UMass Amherst we expect everyone to behave responsibly and honorably. In particular, we expect each of you not to give, receive, or use aid in examinations, nor to give, receive, or use unpermitted aid in any academic work. Doing your part in observing this code, and ensuring that others do likewise is essential for having a community of respect, integrity, fairness, and trust.
If you cheat in a course, you are taking away from your own opportunity to learn and develop as a professional. You also hurt your colleagues, and this will hurt people you will work with in the future, who expect an honest and responsible professional.
As faculty, we pledge to use academic policies designed for fairness, avoiding situations that are conducive to violating academic honesty, as well as unreasonable or unusual procedures that assume dishonesty. We will follow the university's Academic Honesty Policy and Procedures. This means we will report instances of dishonesty, which may lead to formal sanction and/or failing the course.

All work submitted must be your own in presentation. How much outside help is allowed depends on the course component.

The exams will be open-book and no outside help is allowed. Any cheating on an exam is grounds for an F in the course.
Moodle quizzes and lesson questions must be done on your own, consulting the textbook and lecture material.
You may discuss homework with other students, in fact this is encouraged as a learning experience. But again, the writeup must be your work. Copying is not allowed, and collaboration so close that it looks like copying is not allowed. (In general, if we get two identical homeworks we will accept neither of them (i.e., both get F's) and this will be reported to the Academic Honesty Board.) Remember to state on the homework who you worked with as well.
A good practice is to divide your work into an "ideas phase" where you collaborate, and leave with minimal notes, but no shared written matter, and a "writeup phase" where you work alone.
If you make use of a printed or on-line source for the homework, other than specific course materials such as the textbook or web site, please mention it in your writeup. Of course copying a solution to a problem from the web, or from solutions given out in prior semesters, is cheating, and this is easier for us to detect than you might think.
You are free (and encouraged) to discuss answers to discussion questions.

Last modified: Sun Aug 23 18:34:31 EDT 2020