CSE 306 Policy on Academic Dishonesty

This course uses programming assignments as a primary method by which you will build an understanding of Operating Systems concepts. For this course, you may work with a partner on the programming assignments, and each pair of partners will produce a single submission for each of the assignments. The professor will make available at the beginning of the semester a code base on which the assignments will be built. Any additions or modifications made to this code during the semester and submitted for grading must be original work of you or your partner, and no one else. The reason why you are required to do your own coding is that this is the primary way you will learn in this course. If you don't do your own coding, you won't learn what you are supposed to learn.

Academic Dishonesty occurs when you attempt to increase your grade in this course without doing the required work, and consequently without developing fully the knowledge and skills that you are supposed to develop. Students attempt to rationalize Academic Dishonesty in a variety of ways. For example, "I just didn't have the time to spend on this course", or "Since I only plan to be a network administrator when I graduate, I'm not really that interested in programming," or "My friends and I always work together on all our courses," or "I already have a job at an Internet startup, and I just need to graduate so I can start making money."

No matter how you rationalize it, Academic Dishonesty is just plain dishonest. When students pass courses dishonestly, without doing the required work, the value of a Stony Brook degree is diminished for everyone, cheaters and non-cheaters alike. If you are someone who conscientiously does their own work, you ought to be hopping mad about people who pass the course by copying somebody else's programs, or by downloading programs off of the Internet and turning them in as their own. When you graduate, you'll want to take pride in having earned your degree from Stony Brook, and you'll want to know that potential employers also respect the effort and achievement it represents. This won't be the case if people regularly cheat their way to a degree.

As a member of the Stony Brook faculty, I regard it as my very serious responsibility to protect the value of your Stony Brook degree by doing all I can to stamp out Academic Dishonesty. Let me make things plain and simple:

I will not tolerate any form of Academic Dishonesty in this course.

When I find evidence of Academic Dishonesty, I prosecute the case in accordance with University and CEAS regulations. Usually this results in the offending student receiving a "F" grade in the course, and having to take an additional ethics course in order to remove the Academic Dishonesty notation from their transcript. For multiple offenders, it can and has resulted in suspension or expulsion from the University. If I have to prosecute an Academic Dishonesty case against you, it makes me extremely angry, because it consumes a huge amount of my time, which I would rather spend helping people learn. So, don't expect any sympathy from me if I have to submit charges against you.

So there can be no confusion about what I expect of you in this course, I have listed below specific examples of things that you are not permitted to do. If I find evidence that you have done any of these things, I will file Academic Dishonesty charges against you. Do not make the mistake of thinking that I won't notice you among all the other students in the class. I have had many years of experience in reading student programs, and it is much easier than you think to spot cases in which students didn't do their own work.

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Although you may discuss the homework in this course with anyone you like, what you submit for grading, including written material and coding, must be entirely your own work, your partner's work, or part of the code base handed out by the professor at the beginning of the semester. The only exception permitted to this rule is if the professor gives explicit, written permission, in a course handout, Web page, or E-mail, to use or adapt other source code in your work. In this case, the origins of all such code must be clearly cited in your submission.
You may not share, transmit, or receive source code written for this class from anyone else except your partner, the professor, and the TAs. This includes both electronic forms of transmission such as E-mail or downloading, as well as written or printed source code.
Except in the case of explicit written permission given by the professor, you may not include in your submissions for this course any source code obtained from a textbook, downloaded from the Internet, extracted from a software package or source code library, or from any other similar source. Even if you make substantial modifications to such code yourself, you may not include it in your submissions.
The appearance of extremely similar code fragments in more than one partnership's submission will be treated as evidence that code has been shared. Note that code fragments can be extremely similar even if they are formatted differently and use different identifiers. Indeed, the appearance of extremely similar code fragments that differ in this way will be regarded as evidence of an attempt to conceal that sharing has taken place.
If you are in doubt about whether or not you are permitted to use particular source materials, you should obtain written permission from the professor, in advance of your submission. Such permission is best requested and obtained by E-mail.

When you have read this entire document, and you have checked off each of the items in the list above, click on OK below as an acknowledgement that you have done so.