Collaboration and Academic Integrity

Collaboration Policy

You are encouraged to discuss homework assignments with your classmates, but the work you submit must be your own. You may work together to solve problems, but you must write / code your solutions independently without consulting any notes or records from the group work. Do not look directly at anyone else's work or solution. Do not show your work or solution to anyone other than course staff.

You may use the internet for ideas, definitions, and understanding general concepts. You may not copy code directly from the internet or search for solutions to assigned problems. This includes ChatGPT, Google, StackOverflow, reddit, and any other website.

AI Policy

The point of the homework assignments is to think, problem solve, debug, and understand core concepts in programming languages. Using generated code from AI tools makes it too easy to skip over these important steps. As such, you must not have Github Copilot or any other AI-powered tool enabled in your code editor while working on homework assignments for this class.

Simultaneously, AI tools can be extremely useful for facilitating learning. You are allowed to use AI tools like ChatGPT as a tool to help you learn. This includes things like: asking the tool to explain things from the lecture code you don't understand, asking the tool to help you understand an OCaml compiler error message, asking for explanations of concepts or topics covered in the class, etc. You may not copy code that the AI produces directly into your homework implementation.

If you use AI to help you on a homework assignment, you  must cite it by including a comment at the top of your solution indicating how you used it and what you did with the results it produced.

If the course staff becomes aware of AI-usage that does not abide by this policy, we will report it to CSSC.

Academic Integrity

Any attempt to misrepresent the work you did will be dealt with via the appropriate University mechanisms.

Note that, in cases where one student copies the solution of another, both students have violated the policy and there will be consequences for both. Again, all students should keep their solutions private.

If you ever feel uncertain about whether their discussions with other students violated policies, you should (a) ask and (b) describe your collaboration clearly on the assignment. If you do, the worst that will happen is losing some points. That is much better than the alternative.

Please also carefully review the WA State Law on Academic Misconduct and the UW Academic Misconduct Process, which provides the following policy:

Engineering is a profession demanding a high level of personal honesty, integrity and responsibility. Therefore, it is essential that engineering students, in fulfillment of their academic requirements and in preparation to enter the engineering profession, adhere to the College of Engineering Statement of Principles.

Any student in this course suspected of academic misconduct (e.g., cheating, plagiarism, or falsification) will be reported to the College of Engineering Dean’s Office and the University’s Office of Community Standards and Student Conduct to initiate the student conduct process. Any student found to have committed academic misconduct may receive a zero for their grade on the impacted academic work (e.g., assignments, project, or exams), and academic consequences, with the possibility of expulsion.