CMSC 341 Academic Conduct Policy


Academic Integrity

Cheating in any form will not be tolerated. Instances of cheating will be reported to the UMBC Academic Conduct Committee in accordance with UMBC Undergraduate Student Academic Conduct policy. These reports are reviewed by the Academic Conduct Committee and can be used for disciplinary action such as a permanent record on your transcript. Academic honesty is absolutely required of you. You are expected to be honest yourself and to report any cases of dishonesty you see among other students in this class. Reports of dishonest behavior will be kept anonymous.


Academic Conduct for this Course

It is your responsibility to read, understand and adhere to the academic conduct policy presented here. If you ever have a question about cheating in this course, please consult your instructor. Ignorance of our academic conduct policy is not an excuse after the fact.

Note that it would be difficult for you to debug another student's program without violating this policy, since it would be difficult to do any detailed debugging without looking at their code. (You are allowed to explain the meaning of a compiler's error message.) Debugging skills are an integral part of programming skills. You should encourage your friends to develop their own debugging skills or seek help from permitted sources (CSHC tutors, TAs and instructors).

It is your responsibility to maintain your course files so they cannot be read by others. Failure to protect your course files will be considered to be a form of academic dishonesty. In particular, do not store your files in a publicly-accessible directory. If your materials are copied by another person because you failed to protect them, you will be subject to the same disciplinary action as the other person. If in doubt about how to protect your files, ask for help in a UCS lab, at the CSHC, or from a TA or instructor.


Penalties

The penalty for the first violation of this policy is three-fold

  1. A project grade of zero.
  2. A 10% reduction of your semester average (one letter grade).
  3. Actions reported to the Academic Conduct Committee.

A second violation of this policy will result in a semester grade of F and again being reported to the Academic Conduct Committee.

Checking for misconduct may occur at anytime during the semester. For example, if you violated the policy for Project 1, you may be confronted at the end of the semester. Just because you received a grade for a project does not mean you are "in the clear". If you have found to be in violation of for a later project, all previous projects will be checked for possible violation.

We will be using special software to check for cheating. The software is quite sophisticated and can detect most instances of cheating. It will be used to check each and every pair of students for every project, even across sections.