Unfortunately, I often have to deal with students who are suspected of academic dishonesty. This is always thoroughly unpleasant for both the students an myself, but it's a necessary evil of my job as an instructor.
All too often, the students seem entirely confused about why they are meeting with me about the assignment. That they have done something wrong seems to come as a surprise. This is unfortunate and it always occurs to me that if the student didn't know that what they did was wrong, it's almost certainly not the first time they did it, just the first time they got caught.
So, I guess a little education is in order. The work that students submit in courses generally falls into two categories: unsupervised (assignments and exercises) and supervised (exams and tests); I've separated them below.
The discussion below should generally apply to Computing Science courses at SFU, but individual instructors may disagree with some of the details. I should point out that the actual "rules" are in Policy T10.02, Code of Academic Honesty.
Assignments
Actually, the rule is quite simple: you must do your own work on assignments. Some things that aren't okay:
- You can't work together with someone on an assignment, in person or over the Internet, whether that other person is a classmate, friend or tutor. Unless the particular assignment is group work, you're expected to complete the assignment on your own. It doesn't matter if each of you understand what is being written or not: you're expected to work through the assignment on your own.
- If you can't figure out how to complete or fix your work, you may not allow someone to complete it for you. When writing programs in particular, you learn a lot by working out problems on your own and part of the assignment is to do that. No instructor will give you an assignment of the form "give it a shot, but then if you can't figure it out, have somebody else do it."
- You can't take segments of your assignment from an outside source, no matter how well you understand it, or if you think you could have written it yourself. Part of the assignment is to actually write it yourself. Throw the previously prepared work you have away and start again.
Of course, you aren't expected to work in a darkened room, alone, with no outside contact. It is okay to discuss the homework problems with others, as long as you don't cross the line into using their (perhaps partially completed) work or allowing them to use yours. How do you know exactly how close is too close? The easiest guideline is this:
Don't share any written or electronic materials.
A few points about that:
- This includes working so closely together that you might as well have shared written work. Sitting beside a friend and working on a program and saying "now let's try this… now how about this…" is not independent work, even though you're sitting at different computers.
- If you are helping each other, think about pointing someone in the right direction, not telling them how to complete the work. If someone asks you "how did you get … to work," then it's perfectly reasonable to respond
"You have to use binary file output to make that work."
But it's not okay to respond
"Open the file with the code
fp=fopen("foo.dat","wb");and then to write the data, type…" - It's okay to discuss concepts and ideas, but you should not let that turn into discussing the actual details of solutions.
- Sharing part of an assignment is no better than sharing the whole thing.
You should also remember that at SFU, giving your work to someone else is academic dishonesty just as much as using someone else's work. It's your responsibility to safeguard your work against prying eyes.
Probably the best advice is to start your assignment early. A lot of explainations of academic dishonesty start with "It was 11:45, I couldn't get it to work, and I panicked."
Exams
In tests and exams, you should not have any contact with any pre-prepared materials (unless you're specifically allowed to do so in that exam) or other people (except the people proctoring the exam). If this is a surprise to you, you should probably withdraw from the University.