Academic Integrity

My position on cheating

There is no cheating of any kind in any of my classes. If you cheat, I might still like you as a person, and also feel sorry that you will be failing the class and have to pay for it again. But, professionally, I am not on your side. Instead, I am on the side of my 80 other students in the class who are also working very hard, are sometimes under pressure, and have stretched to pay their tuition bills, but would never think of cheating. I am extremely vigilant about protecting a fair class environment for them. I am on their side. If you are an honest student who does your work, you can count on me to protect your grades and the reputation of your DePaul degree to the best of my ability.

DePaul Academic Integrity reporting.

I protect my hardworking students! There is zero tolerance in this class for failures of academic integrity. There is no remedy for violations. Concerns include, but are not limited to:

Penalties

Formal referral to the Office of Academic Integrity, creating a permanent mark on your university record and, potentially (for repeat offenders), permanent expulsion from the university. This is always combined with course penalties.
Failure in the course is the default (100% reduction in your course grade).
Failure on the assignment and additionally a 20—40% reduction in your course grade is sometimes assessed.

Use of LLMs like ChatGPT

See LLMs (like ChatGPT) rules.
See Grading in the time of LLMs.

Turn It In plagiarism checker

For many classes I provide a TII plagiarism checker for students to review after they have submitted their assignment. IN ALL CASES plagiarism can occur with even a few lines of cricital novel code, or a few written sentences. ALWAYS do your own work.

Some assignments will not be accepted for grading: No programming assignments reporting a TII score of more than maximum similarity will be graded because the likelihood of failure in the class is too high. Refer to TII similarity overlap limit.

Computer program plagiarism

If you write your own code, and your own comments, you will be fine and should have no plagiarism concerns. In some cases you might need to add more detailed comments, rewrite my helper code in your own style, and/or add program functionality to reduce TII reporting to below a maximum so that we will grade your work for credit.

Students are not allowed to electronically copy someone else's whole program solutions to an assignment and modify them. The rules: (a) every line of code must come from your design and be typed in by you, and (b) you must develop your assignment from scratch (or from base starter code I give you), building the final solution a little bit at a time, based on your own programming solutions.

You are allowed to scan the web and textbooks to see general programming design for various kinds of sub-problems (e.g., how to implement an ArrayList, or how to create a comparitor for a sorting algorithm) having nothing specifically to do with the assignment for which you are writing progam code. If you use someone's ideas for simple utility functions, you should include a URL for where you found the work. One helpful rule: If copying and pasting an electronic copy of someone else's short utility code is useful in your own program, you probably should not be using it. If you write your own version based on what you have learned from them, you may be OK.

I've never seen it, but if you are concerned that your own original solution to a class programming assignment will be miraculously similar to someone else's work, then you can always create a series of subdirectories with checkpoints of your work as you develop your code. Now you have evidence of your development work.

Checklists

Checklists for this course are a contract between the student and the professor. The default for all checklist items is No. If you change an item to Yes you are claiming, absolutely, to have done the work indicated. An inaccurate checklist that claims work not actually done results in zero grade, a significant points penalty in the course, and, possibly a failing course grade, and sanction through the dean's office. We will assume that you are attempting to cheat your peers by claiming work that was not done. If you are really in doubt, change No to Maybe or Probably and give a short explanation at the bottom of the checklist. Examples would be, "I wrote the code and it usually works, but sporadically fails every tenth time or so" and "I wasn't sure if you meant three list items or three nodes; I did implement three nodes, but not three list items" and so on.

Example: Sam spends 35 hours on her jokeserver assignment, and does a very good, but not quite complete job on it. She turns it in before completing randomizing of the jokes (a minor part of the assignment worth only a few points). She checks Yes next to "randomizes jokes" and turns in her checklist with her assignment. Ordinarily she would have received 95 of 100 points for her work. Result: Zero points on the assignment. Additionaly, 20% course penalty resulting in a D in the class. Referral to the dean's office for an academic integrity violation. No remedy.

Citations

There are a number of written assignments, and programs, turned in for this class. The default assumption is that any work you turn in is your own. If you submit ANY work of others that is not clearly cited as being the work of others, you will be sanctioned: zero grade on the assignment, outright failure in the class, referral to the dean's office for an academic integrity violation.

Example: Louis spends 100 hours over the course of the quarter, completing a thirty-page ethics paper. He includes a really interesting pair of paragraphs that he found on the web, but fails to cite the original work and author. He submits his paper for grading. Ordinarily he would have received full credit for his paper, and possibly even extra points for exceptional work in this area. Result: Zero grade for his paper. Failure in the class. Referral to the dean's office. No remedy.

For some assignments no work of others is allowed, even if you have cited it.

Example: Eddie spends 120 hours over the course of the quarter producing an excellent 8,000-word research/study log for which the rules clearly state he is not allowed to use ANY work of others—even if he cites it. However, Eddie does not pay attention to the rule, includes two paragraphs from the web—clearly cited—in his log, then turns it in. Result: Zero grade for his study log. Failure in the class. Referral to the dean's office. No remedy.

When in doubt, cite! (But note that you still might be guilty of plagiarism if you've included too much of the work of others.) Change the font of included text, and possibly use quotation marks, to make absolutely clear that it is the work of others. Make absolute certain that you are allowed to included the cited work of others in a particular assignment. (E.g., not allowed in the study logs!)

Gray Areas

The concepts and programming constructs in this class have been well-covered by others. There will be little that qualifies as original research. As long as you write your own programs and write all of the text that you submit (that is, the keystrokes are generated by your own brain) you should be fine, even though there may be small overlaps with the work of others. Example: a small utility java function for iterating through a list that appears in more than 100 forms on the web.

Example: In his programming assignment Joe included his own version of a simple utility list iteration function he found on the web in an unrelated program. He included the URL where he got it in the comments. Result: no problem.

Example: Joe include several passages from the book and some references from the web, in his discussion forum postings. He changed the font of the text to give contrast to his own commentary, and clearly cited where the passages came from. Result: no problem.

DePaul's Academic Integrity Wording:

Academic integrity entails absolute honesty in one's intellectual efforts. The DePaul Student Handbook details the facets and ramifications of academic integrity violations, but you should be especially aware of the policies on cheating and plagiarism. Cheating is any action that violates University norms or an instructor's including using or providing unauthorized assistance or materials on course assignments, or possessing unauthorized materials during an examination. Plagiarism involves the representation of another's work copied from published or unpublished sources such as the internet, print, computer files, audio disks, video programs or musical scores without proper acknowledgement that it is someone else's or copying of any source in whole or in part with only minor changes in wording or syntax even with acknowledgement; (c) submitting as one's own a file, lab report or other assignment which has been prepared by someone else. If you are unsure about what constitutes unauthorized help on an exam or assignment, or what information requires citation and/or attribution, please ask your instructor. Violations may result in the failure of the assignment, failure of the course, and/or additional disciplinary actions.