Course Policies

Adapted from Prof. Ryan Culpepper's CS624 Course policies
CS240 Homepage

Academic Honesty

Students are required to adhere to the polices expressed at the University web site Academic Policies and Rights. In particular, students must follow the UMB Academic Honesty Policy, as described in Appendix B of the Student Code of Conduct document. This means that all submitted work must be completely yours — that is, written from scratch, in your own words, without reference to anyone else’s work. Read all of the subsections of this policy for clarifications and additional prohibited behavior.


Consequences

Academic honesty violations will result in:

Note that the department and the Dean of Students Office may also impose additional penalties on top of the ones listed above.

See list of Academic Honesty Violations and Collaboration Policy for more details.


Collaboration Policy

All submitted work be must your own — that is, written from scratch, in your own words.
Discussing homework with other students, however, is allowed and encouraged.
Consulting other reference sources to learn course materials is also allowed, with the exception of “tutoring” sites like Chegg, Course Hero, Study, Bartleby, etc.
All discussion or external sources, however, must be disclosed. See README.


README

Every submitted homework must include the following information, either as a separate file named README (with an appropriate file extension) or as a section of the main file marked README:


Collaboration Violations

Submitting work that is not your own is an academic honesty violation.
Note that taking someone else’s answer and doing any of the following is still considered “not your own words”:

  • changing variable names or replacing words with synonyms,

  • changing a sentence’s grammar,

  • rearranging order of sentences or paragraphs,

  • cutting words or sentences,

  • any other isomorphic obfuscations.

If you are unsure, ask a member of the course staff.


Distribution of Course Materials

Course materials may not be distributed without permission from the instructor.
This means you may not post homework questions to mailing lists or websites like Stack Overflow, Chegg, Course Hero, etc.
Infractions will be considered academic honesty violations.


Regret Policy

(Adapted from Harvard CS50’s policy)

The course staff understands that many academic honesty violations occur in a moment of panic right before a deadline.
Thus we will allow the following “regret” policy:
If you commit an academic honesty violation that you later regret, you may notify the course staff at any time before the homework in question has been graded and returned.
In exchange for your honesty, you will receive zero points for the problem in question and the matter will be considered closed. No additional penalties will be imposed and no further action will be taken (except in the cases where this policy is abused).