You are expected to act ethically. See the The JHU Ethics site for more details on the university's ethics policy, and also read the CS Department's academic integrity code.
Course Cheating Policy
- It is considered cheating to copy code from another student's assignment or for two students to share code (this includes code from assignments submitted in past years). It is not even allowed for you to show any working code you have to another student. You may ask another student for help with code you have that is not working. If you are helping such a student, you cannot show them your correct code as a way of answering their question. It is not considered cheating to discuss general ideas on how to solve a problem with another student. The project cheating policy below describes what constitutes cheating on the project portion of the course.
- Cheating is immoral. Cheaters that are caught will be punished as is required under University policy. Please report all instances of cheating you see to the professor. This is an unpleasant task but the alternative to not reporting it is worse.
- Clear-cut cases of cheating will be reported to the Undergraduate Academic Ethics Board. If a student is found guilty, this information is placed on their permanent academic record.
- If some action seems a grey area to you, please ask first before proceeding!
Project Cheating Policy
Since the course project is open-ended, it is easy to "re-use" knowledge that you may already have, or to re-use other code you may find on the web or obtain through others. Any such instance of re-use will most of the time be OK but must be documented in your submitted documents. Examples include: writing a Java version of a project you did last summer in C++; writing a rip-off of a PC application you know well; using a project idea that a group (of who a friend/relative of yours was a member) had developed previously in this course or some other course or job. Rip-offs are great, as long as you acknowledge your sources. If in doubt about whether an instance of re-use should be documented, e-mail or talk to the professor. Reuse of code which is not so acknowledged is considered cheating.