Academic Integrity

We understand the pressures that students face. You'll find that we are extremely flexible in helping you out of a jam, but cheating hurts you in the long run, and penalties are stiff even in the short run.

If you are tempted to cheat, don't.
Come talk to us instead.

Academic Integrity is important, for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is your own self-esteem and pride in your work. The penalties for Academic Misconduct at Rose-Hulman can be severe. For example:

The normal penalty in this course for getting OR GIVING help to another student on an exam is an F in the course. Repeated Academic Misconduct will lead to the student being dismissed from Rose-Hulman.

The Institute policy on academic misconduct includes:

“Rose-Hulman expects its students to be responsible adults and to behave at all times with honor and integrity.”

This page describes how the above applies to CSSE 120.

Giving help inappropriately is a violation of academic integrity, just as is receiving help inappropriately.

Exams

are to be done INDIVIDUALLY, with NO COMMUNICATION with anyone other than your instructor and her delegates. Each exam will have explicit rules for what written resources you may use for what parts of the exam.

In doing the Preparation for a Session:

Feel free to collaborate on the quizzes with classmates as long as:

Everyone in the group (including you) watches the videos and/or does the reading at the same time, and
You form your OWN answer to each quiz question. Only AFTER doing so may you discuss possible answers with your group (and turn in a consensus answer if you wish).

For code that you turn in, either from a session project that you begin in class or as part of your Capstone Team Project:

Your professors, the course assistants and you work as a TEAM to help your learning. At each session, we supply quizzes and programming problems for you to do. They are not graded per se, but COMPLETING them is REQUIRED for you to pass the course.

Of course, merely COMPLETING those exercises is not enough; we want you to LEARN from doing them. To that end, we have established clear rules for what help you are permitted to get on those exercises, and what help is NOT allowed.

Rule 0: Get exceptions as needed in advance.

Everyone has their own way of learning. If you need an exception to one of the following rules, talk to your instructor about it IN ADVANCE of any possible violation.

Unless you have EXPLICIT permission from your instructors to do otherwise, failing to follow any of the following rules is academic misconduct.

Rule 1: Completely understand ALL the code that you turn in.

You must completely understand everything that you turn in. In particular, you must be able to explain exactly what your code does and exactly how it forms a correct solution to the problem.

If you don't understand your own code, simply ask your instructor or a course assistant to explain it to you. If they are not available when you turn in your work, put the tag NEED HELP (in all caps) in a comment near the code that you do not understand and get help on it at the next class session.

The above applies to ALL code that you turn in, regardless of whether you did it by yourself or got help on it.

Rule 2: Get help from the right people.

The instructors and course assistants are trained to help you and not merely give answers. For that reason, the only humans from whom you can get help are as follows:

Your instructors and other CSSE faculty.
The CSSE 120 course assistants.
The CSSE evening lab assistants. They are in the CSSE labs (Moench F-217 and F-225) on most Sunday through Thursday evenings.
Tutors from the Learning Center (including Percopo tutors).
Other students currently taking CSSE 120, but ONLY as described below.

You may NOT get help from anyone else in doing the exercises. No other CSSE majors, no RAs or SAs, no parents, no aliens from Mars, etc.

If you feel that an exception to this would enhance your learning, talk to your instructor about that BEFORE you get any such help.

Regarding other students currently taking CSSE 120:

When doing group/team work, you may get help from your teammates as long as you are fully engaged in solving the problems.
In class, you may ask questions and get help from classmates as long as you:
1. First attempt the problem yourself (or with your partner when pair programming).
  It is NEVER right to begin by copying someone else's solution to the problem.
2. Type the code yourself (or with your partner when pair programming).
  It is NEVER right to give or accept code electronically from anyone other than your instructor and her course assistants.
3. When you get substantial help from someone other than your instructor or a course assistant, put a comment near the top of the file that indicates from whom you got help and include the tag GOT HELP (in all caps).

Rule 3: Use written resources, including the WWW (internet), but give due attribution.

You may use any written materials and videos in doing any of the exercises. Excellent examples include:

The course videos and other materials available under the course home page.
The examples that your instructor gives you via the programming projects.
Our course question-answering system (Piazza).
The WWW (internet), including the superb stackoverflow.com and other sites that you find by googling.

The only caveat is that you must give due attribution when you use work that others supply. For CSSE 120 that means:

You may use any materials that we supplied with no attribution needed. For example, you may copy an example from code that we supplied when you are working on your own code modifying the example as needed.
- Warning: Be cautious about doing such copying too much. There is a lot to be said for typing (rather than copying) your code, to help develop “muscle memory”.
You may use any explanations (but NOT examples of code) that you get from any written source, with no attribution required.
You may copy small snippets of code (say, fewer than 10 or so lines of code) from any source and use/modify them with no attribution needed.
If you use a larger example of code in figuring out a solution that you turn in, you must put a comment near the top of the file that indicates the URL from which you got help and includes the tag GOT HELP (in all caps).

Exception: