CMSC 341 Academic Conduct Policy
Academic Integrity
Cheating in any form will not be tolerated. Instances of cheating will be reported to the UMBC Academic Conduct Committee in accordance with UMBC Undergraduate Student Academic Conduct policy. These reports are reviewed by the Academic Conduct Committee and can be used for disciplinary action such as a permanent record on your transcript. Academic honesty is absolutely required of you. You are expected to be honest yourself and to report any cases of dishonesty you see among other students in this class. Reports of dishonest behavior will be kept anonymous.
Academic Conduct for this Course
It is your responsibility to read, understand and adhere to the academic conduct policy presented here. If you ever have a question about cheating in this course, please consult your instructor. Ignorance of our academic conduct policy is not an excuse after the fact.
- This policy applies to programming projects and to homework assignments.
- You may discuss general ideas with other students, but all of the work you submit must be your own work except for help received from a TA or an instructor.
- Unless explicitly permitted by the assignment, you are not allowed to copy material from another source, including but not limited to: web sites, books, current students in CMSC341, former students in CMSC341, parents, siblings and any other person who is not a TA for this course or an instructor for this course.
- You may not be in possession of another student's work, even briefly, either in paper or electronic form.
- You must not provide your own work to another student either in paper or electronic form. You must protect your work from access by others.
- In the case of copying between current students, penalties apply to the student who copied and also to the student copied from.
Note that it would be difficult for you to debug another student's program without violating this policy, since it would be difficult to do any detailed debugging without looking at their code. (You are allowed to explain the meaning of a compiler's error message.) Debugging skills are an integral part of programming skills. You should encourage your friends to develop their own debugging skills or seek help from permitted sources.
It is your responsibility to maintain your course files so they cannot be read by others. Failure to protect your course files will be considered to be a form of academic dishonesty. In particular, do not store your files in a publicly-accessible directory. If your materials are copied by another person because you failed to protect them, you will be subject to the same disciplinary action as the other person.
We will be using special software to check for cheating. The software is quite sophisticated and can detect most instances of cheating. It will be used to check each and every pair of students for every project, even across sections.
If you find and use some code from the internet, do realize that if another students finds and uses the same code, then your code may be flagged as a match with the other student's code. Websites also copy from other websites, so using code from an obscure website does not guarantee uniqueness.
Penalties
The first violation of this policy will result in:
- A project grade of zero.
- Actions reported to the Academic Conduct Committee.
A second violation of this policy will result in a semester grade of F and again being reported to the Academic Conduct Committee.
Checking for misconduct may occur at anytime during the semester. For example, if you violated the policy for Project 1, you may be confronted at the end of the semester. Just because you received a grade for a project does not mean you are "in the clear". If you have found to be in violation of for a later project, all previous projects will be checked for possible violation.