• You are strongly encouraged to collaborate with one another in studying the textbook and the lecture material.

• As long as it satisfies the following conditions, collaboration on the homework assignments is encouraged and will not reduce your grade:
  1. Before discussing each homework problem with anyone else, you must give it an honest half-hour of serious thought.
  2. You may discuss ideas and approaches with other students in the class, but not share actual code or solutions to other types of problems. In other words, the work you submit must be entirely your own, which you must complete without looking at other people's work, and you must not permit others to copy your work. You must also acknowledge clearly in the appropriate portion of your solutions (e.g., in the comments of your code) people with whom you discussed ideas for that portion.
  3. You may get help from the teaching staff and from tutors in the lab for specific homework problems. Don't expect them to do it for you, however.
  4. If you get really stuck with a bug in a program (defined roughly as over an hour of frustration), you are allowed to get help from a friend as long as you acknowledge that help clearly in your solutions (e.g., in the comments of your code).
  5. You may not work with people outside this class (but come and talk to us if you have a tutor), seek online solutions, get someone else to do it for you, etc.

• You are not permitted to collaborate on exams.

The last point is particularly important: if you don't make an honest effort on the homework but always get ideas from others, your exam scores will reflect it.

Violations of the Collaboration Policy*
Violations of collaboration policy fall into two categories: ones that are acknowledged at the time they occur (for example, in clearly marked comments in your code) and ones that are unacknowledged.

Acknowledged violations (e.g., using someone else's code for a method you didn't know how to write yourself, and stating clearly in your code that this is not your own work) will result in an appropriate reduction in the grade, but will not be considered cheating.

Unacknowledged violations of the collaboration policy--for example, not stating the names of your collaborators, or any other attempt to represent the work of another as your own--will result in an automatic failing grade and will be reported to the Academic Conduct Committee (ACC). The ACC often suspends or expels students deemed guilty of plagiarism or other forms of cheating. We will assume that you understand the CAS Academic Conduct Code, copies of which are available in room CAS 105.

If you are uncertain as to whether a particular kind of interaction with someone else constitutes illegal collaboration or academic dishonesty, please ask Dr. Sullivan before taking any action that might violate the rules; if you can't reach him in time, then at the very least include a clear explanation of what happened in your homework write-up to avoid being treated as a cheater. Citing your sources is usually the easiest way out of trouble.