This document exists to clarify your instructor’s expectations of you in this course in terms of collaboration on individual and group assessments.
The focus of this document is source code reuse, but academic integrity in also discussed.
Collaboration is not a dirty word.
Much of this document was based on the Academic Integrity guidelines from MIT with modifications for use at Red River College made by Kyle Geske.
Kyle is citing this source so that he will not be accused of plagiarizing a document that deals with plagiarism. :)
The source document was retrieved on March 9th 2016.
Fundamental to the academic work you do at Red River College is an expectation that you will make choices that reflect integrity and responsible behaviour.
RRC will ask much of you. Occasionally, you may feel overwhelmed by the amount of work you need to accomplish. You may be short of time, working on several assignments due the same day, or preparing for exams. The pressure can be intense. However, no matter what level of stress you may find yourself under, your instructor expects you to approach your work with honesty and integrity.
Honesty is the foundation of good academic work. Whether you are working on an assignment, exam, project or paper, avoid engaging in plagiarism, unauthorized collaboration, cheating, or facilitating academic dishonesty.
Assignments and projects are intended to be an individual efforts. You are encouraged to discuss approaches with other students, but your source-code must be your own. You may not use materials produced as course work by other students in the course, whether in this term or previous terms, nor may you provide your work for other students to use or reference.
Copying work, or knowingly making work available for copying, is a serious offense that may incur reduced grades, failing the course and disciplinary action.
Material from external authoritative sources can be used with proper attribution. Attribution of 3rd party code is covered later in this document.
Some of your courses may involve a peer review process for assignment completion and evaluation. The aim of the process is to encourage collaboration, thorough testing of assignments, and motivate you to strive for excellence in your work.
Courses that employ this peer review process still require you to create an individual version of each assignment.
Your individual assignment submissions must be your own work, as detailed in the previous section.
The peer review process is explained in a separate document.
When you use or adapt code developed by someone else as part of an assignment, you must cite your source. You do this by including an inline comment in the code. These citation comments not only ensure proper credit where it is due, but allow your instructor to confirm that you understand the copied code.
For example, while researching for an assignment you might come across some helpful code as part of an answer on Stack Overflow. If you make use of this code in your assignment you must cite your source in the manor explained below.
Although it is common practice to adapt code examples found on the web, you should never include any amount of code written by other students in your individual assignments; Red River College students are not considered an authorized source for copied code.
When should I provide a code citation in my code?
How should I cite the code?
Examples of source code citation can be found here.
Ultimate challenges are short coding assignments designed to give you practice with the material your instructor has just covered in class.
Unlike with assignments, you are free to collaborate on your source-code with your fellow students. You may even wish to practice pair-programming coding with another students using a single machine.
If you develop your challenge source-code by pairing, you are permitted to submit two copies of the same code.
Quizzes are closed-book assessments written on paper or in online during class time.
You are typically not permitted to reference any resources during a quiz.
All of your quiz responses must be your own work.
Communication with any other individual, whether verbal, written, or electronic is not permitted, except to ask questions of your instructor.
Exams for my third-term courses are open-book coding assessments.
Permitted open-book resources include all course note found in the course Learn content section. The exam itself will also include a list of permitted reference URLs.
Resources which are not permitted include completed assignments and challenges from the course, whether from this term or previous terms, including your own work. Access to Google or “the internet at large” is not permitted, save for the provided URLs mentioned above.
All of your exam source code (and other deliverables) must be your own work.
Communication with any other individual, whether verbal, written, or electronic is not permitted, except to ask questions of your instructor.
Some of the assessments you complete at the college are individual efforts, others will permit group work.
In this course the breakdown is as follows: