Academic Integrity

Inherited Policies

CS135 is subject to policies, guidelines and procedures that are set by the School of Computer Science, the Faculty of Mathematics, and the university as a whole. You should be aware of the following:

Academic Integrity for CS135

We won’t rehash the above policies, but we do want to make them concrete for CS135.

You may talk about CS135 concepts and ideas with whoever you want. You may work on sample problems (eg from the course website or a textbook) together. You may ask CS135 staff any question you want.

You may not:

  • show other CS135 students your assignment code.
  • view the assignment code of another CS135 student (“view” includes “hear” – can’t have someone dictate it to you).
  • seek help from people (other than CS135 staff), the internet, assignment completion factories, etc.
  • publicly post your assignment code anywhere on the internet, ever (even after you’ve finished the course).

A specific assignment may give exceptions to the above. A00 is such an example.

To play it safe, leave an hour or more between discussions with friends and writing your own code. Go grab a bite to eat, work on another course, go for a walk…. If what you discussed is still helpful after an hour, we’ll assume it is your knowledge and not your friend’s knowledge.

Generative AI (e.g. ChatGPT)

Everything we just said about getting help from your friends, also applies to generative AI tools (ChatGPT, Copilot, etc.). You are welcome to use these tools to help you understand the course material, but you should not:

  • ask these tools to write assignment code for you.
  • submit code written by these tools as if it is your own work.
  • cut-and-paste your assignment code into them for debugging assistance.

Things that are okay, and even encouraged: Using these tools to help you solve warm-up and practice questions. Using these tools to translate assignment text into another language to help you understand it. Asking these tools to help you understand a concept or to provide examples of the concept.

Just like you can’t ask your friend or an online tutor for the answer, and then submit it as your own work, you can’t ask an AI tool to answer the question.

Also, these tools will not be available when you write the exam, so you need to understand how to solve these problems yourself in order to pass the course.

MOSS

MOSS (Measure of Software Similarities) is used in this course as a means of comparing students’ assignments to ensure academic integrity. We will report suspicious activity, and penalties for plagiarism/cheating are severe. Please read the available information about academic integrity very carefully.

Other Academic Integrity Issues

It is an academic integrity violation to attempt to interfere with the intended operation of automated submission and marking systems. Examples include, but are not limited to:

  • printing or returning values in order to match expected test results rather than making an actual reasonable attempt to solve the problem as required in the assignment question specification.
  • mounting a denial of service attack on such systems.
  • attempting to run malicious code during the submission or marking process.