Com S 342: Principles of Programming Languages

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Policy on Academic Honesty^[1]

Students enrolled in Computer Science courses at ISU are expected to maintain the highest standards of academic integrity. Cases of cheating that go undetected and hence unpunished skew the grading curve in a class, thereby lowering the grades for students who do not cheat. Students who cheat rob themselves not only of knowledge and skills that they should have acquired in a course, but also of the experience of learning how to learn, arguably the most valuable benefit of a university education. The reputation of the department, the university, and the value of the degree suffer if employers find the graduates of a program lacking in abilities that successful completion of specific courses should guarantee. Most professions, including Computer Science, have codes of ethics or standards to which individuals will be expected to abide by. At the University, you practice the integrity that you must demonstrate later. Suspected cases of academic misconduct will be pursued fully in accordance with ISU policies. Students are strongly urged to consult the Iowa State University's policy on academic dishonesty. A copy of the policy can be obtained from here. The information included here is intended to help students avoid unintentionally committing academic dishonesty.

The primary purpose of assignments is to clarify and enhance the understanding of the concepts covered in the lectures. Past experience with this course has shown that this is helped by increased interaction among students. Discussion of general concepts and questions concerning the homework and programming assignments among students is encouraged. However, each student is expected to work on the solutions individually (except in the case of assignments that are explicitly assigned to teams of students).

Programming Assignments

When discussing code with other students, you may:

• discuss algorithms, data structures, and implementation strategies
• assist in debugging, possibly by suggesting diagnostic print statements or test cases
• provide or receive help in understanding the code that is supplied to the class

It is expected that you have written EVERY LINE OF CODE that you submit (with the exception of code given out in class) as part of your solution for a lab assignment. The following are examples of activities that are PROHIBITED:

• Writing code with another student
• Copying code from another student
• Sharing code with another student (via email, printouts, web, ftp sites, etc.)
• Posting code in a location that is accessible to others
• Using code fragments provided by other students (including students who had taken the course in the past)
• Using code fragments that are freely available (e.g., in public repositories) without properly acknowledging and citing the source

Homework

When discussing problems from assigned homework with other students, you may:

• discuss the material presented in class or included in the assigned readings needed for solving the problem(s)
• assist another student in understanding the statement of the problem (e.g., you may assist a non-native speaker by translating some English phrases unfamiliar to that student)

It is expected that you have independently arrived at solutions that you turn in for problem sets. The following are examples of activities that are PROHIBITED:

• sharing solutions or fragments of solutions (via email, whiteboard, handwritten or printed copies, etc.)
• posting solutions or fragments of solutions in a location that is accessible to others
• using solutions or fragments of solutions provided by other students (including students who had taken the course in the past)
• using solutions or solution fragments obtained on the Internet or from solution manuals for text books

Term Projects

You may make use of all the resources available at your disposal, including the published work of others, publicly available code, publicly available data sets, as well as consultation with others (fellow students, faculty, or other experts on the topic of your project). Note however, that your conduct of the project should be guided by the best practices of academic research and writing.

In particular, you should exercise utmost care to avoid plagiarism: the deliberate use of someone else's language, ideas, data, code, or other original material that is not common knowledge without properly acknowledging the source. You should also familiarize yourself with appropriate ways to acknowledge the contributions of others and to cite all your sources (See for example, ISU library's index of resources for avoiding plagiarism).

Students may choose to work in teams of 2 or 3 members on the term project. Collaboration within a team is expected and encouraged. Each team member is expected to contribute to all aspects of the project: including conception of the initial idea, planning, implementation (including design and analysis of algorithms, design, implementation, and testing of code, experimental evaluation) and reporting (including organization and writing of the report). However, because each individual brings unique abilities to a team, and one of the goals of working in a team is to take advantage of the unique abilities of the team members, it is not unusual for the contributions of individual team members to vary across tasks. To ensure that each team member gets credit for his or her contributions, the final report should include a statement of contributions that explicitly identifies the contributions of each team member and a statement that every team member concurs with the contents of the report. If there are irreconcilable differences among members your team, you should notify the course staff as early as possible (but after having made a good faith effort to resolve the differences among yourselves) so we can help resolve the differences or suggest alternatives.

Submitting a single term project or paper for credit in two different classes (in the same semester or in different semesters) is not allowed unless explicit permission to do so is obtained in advance from each of the professors involved.

Exams

Copying someone else's solutions, using notes or reference materials (unless instructed otherwise), altering an exam for re-grading, getting an advance copy of the examination, or having someone else write the exam amount to cheating on an exam.

You need to exercise special care with take-home exams. You should NEVER

• share solutions or fragments of solutions (via email, whiteboard, handwritten or printed copies, etc.)
• post solutions or fragments of solutions in a location that is accessible to others
• use solutions or fragments of solutions provided by other students (including students who had taken the course in the past)
• use solutions or solution fragments obtained on the Internet or from solution manuals for text books
• use material from text books, reference books, or research articles without properly acknowledging and citing the source

^[1] The academic honesty policy has been compiled using material adapted from several sources including the past offerings of this course, other computer science courses at Iowa State University, as well as other universities. In particular, majority of this policy comes from Com S 572 as taught by Professor Vasant Honavar.