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Academic Honesty

A university is a community, and every community has values and rules that go hand-in-hand with membership in the community. At universities one rule is the standard of academic honesty as it has been understood and followed for all of the just-ending millennium. This rule is not written down in a standard text such as Magna Carta or the Constitution, but is the same for every educational institution even though they all have individual statements of it.

The tremendous influx of students to CSE has eroded the community bonds enough to be noticeable compared to 5 or 10 years ago. Hence we have recently agreed that we must require students in every course to read (or: be officially informed of) UB's statements of the rules, which are now online and collected as links on the page http://www.cse.buffalo.edu/undergrad/policy_academic.php.

In this course, all assignments will be individual, and the rule takes a particularly simple form: All assignments must be your own work. This term does not need a definition or legal parsing. Tens of thousands have graduated from my alma mater with no exam proctors or vetting, just needing to sign ``This represents my own work in accordance with University regulations'' on every exam paper or major submission. The only difficulty is for those actively (and quite justifiably!) seeking help on assignments. The Department has a reasonable guideline tailored to programming projects at the above URL. Note that it is absolute that writeups of assignments must be completely your own production--in this course that is especially meaningful because formal presentation of solutions is an important course subject and goal in itself. I will talk about ``reasonable discussion'' of problems in class at some convenient and good time.

Well over half the cases of clear cheating I have caught on single problem sets have been [claimed to be] one student copying off another who couldn't attend class and asked the ``trusted friend'' to submit for him/her. In such cases both students receive a zero on the set with a notation made in their files; and it is only for ``first offenses'' of this nature that I show this kind of leniency. If this follows a previous offense reported by a colleague, or for anything more serious or sustained, the student(s) is/are liable for an automatic F in the course and/or explusion from the Department (cum-University).


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Next: Incompletes and Withdrawals Up: Organization and Course Policies Previous: Organization and Course Policies