Your friends might cheat; perhaps the culture you grew up with supports cheating as a normal activity as long as one does not get caught. If so, it is time for you to move past those friends, and to adopt here, at DePaul, an updated culture. Cheating is always wrong at DePaul. Cheating always hurts those doing the hardest work for the good of all. Cheating is not moral.
If you know that someone is cheating, I hope you will do the right thing and tell them to stop it. Ask them to consider the harm they really are doing to others who are not willing to cheat.
In general anything "passed around" among a small group of students secretly, but not known to the instructor, and not available to the community of students, is probably unethical. That is, if someone obtained a secretly "leaked" copy of an old exam and four students secretly used it to study without letting others know about it, this would be unethical. By contrast, if four students worked in a study group and compared notes each week during the quarter, this would not be unethical. What is the test case? How would our hard-working, honest, student feel? They might wish that they were able to participate in the study group, but would not feel it unfair that they could not; if they knew about the stolen or leaked exam, however, they would be very discouraged.
If you borrow some code from somewhere, then put in a comment about where it came from.
If you borrow some good ideas in your logs, then put in a comment about where they came from.
If you get some ideas from the Web, make it clear where you got the ideas from. NEVER copy in text without CLEARLY citing where it came from. Do your best to at least cite the original author by name, and always give the URL.
If you claim you did something in a ECT425 checklist, but you did not actually do it, this is explicitly cheating. Be careful. When in doubt about whether something is an instance of cheating, then you must ask me.