Cheating

Cheating in any form will not be tolerated. Instances of cheating will be reported to the UMBC Academic Conduct Committee in accordance with UMBC Student Academic Conduct policy. These reports are filed by the 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.

It is your responsbility to read, understand and adhere to the Student Honor Code If you ever have a question about cheating in this course, please ask the instructor about it. Ignorance about the cheating policy is not a defense after the fact. Your project assignments are to be entirely your own. You may discuss general course ideas with others, but everything you submit must be just your own work.

It is never permitted to copy code from someone else nor to provide code to someone else. This applies to paper and electronic forms of the code. Help received from the CSHC, TA, or instructor may be included in your submittals.

Here is a general rule for you to follow:

Having someone else's work in your possession or giving your work to someone else in any form, even briefly, is dishonest.

Penalty

The penalty for the first violation of this policy is three-fold
  1. A project grade of zero.
  2. A 10% reduction of your semester average (one letter grade).
  3. 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 ths semester. Therefore, if you violated the policy for Project 1, you may be confronted about that at any time. Just because you recieved a grade for a project does not mean you are "in the clear". Once you have found to be in violation of the policy, all previous projects will be rechecked for possible violation.

You must protect your materials from observation by others. 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. If in doubt about how to protect your files, ask for help in a UCS lab, at the CSHC, or from the TA or instructor.

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.