Homework Assignments, Projects, and Academic Conduct
In all data science graduate classes, all the homework assignments and programming projects must be completed by your own individual effort unless it is a group project/assignment. You should never have a copy of someone else’s solution/project (in part or in whole) either on paper or electronically under any circumstance. Also, you should never give a copy of your solution/project, either on paper or electronically, to another student. Unless it is expressed explicitly, this also means that you cannot “work” on the solution/project together. Cases of academic dishonesty will be dealt with severely.
Thus, you should:
- Understand that having someone else’s project (even a small part) in your possession, even briefly, is considered cheating.
- Understand that you can use AI tools for
- Spell or grammar checking and correcting those mistakes in the things that you write,
- Summarizing what you wrote
- Fixing the bug in the code you wrote
is fine but asking AI tools to create content/code/report/essay for you and submitting it with some modifications as if it was your production is considered cheating.
- Safeguard your account password; you are responsible for the actions of anyone else you may allow logging into your account.
- Safeguard hard copies of your programs; excuses such as “I must have left a copy of my code in the lab where someone else must have found it” will not be accepted.
- If you need help with your assignment/project, please see your instructor or our graduate tutors.
The following is a non-exhaustive list of Academic Integrity violations:
- Emailing code in whole or in part
- Instant Messaging code in whole or in part
- Posting or obtaining code in whole or in part on the web, including but not limited to forums and newsgroups
- Not taking the appropriate measures to protect your source code, including:
- Placing your code in a public directory
- Failing to lock your screen when away from your computer
- Allowing someone to copy code from your monitor
- Giving your password to another student
The following behaviors are not Academic Integrity violations and are, in fact, encouraged:
- Asking a fellow student how they approached a problem
- Brainstorming with fellow students
- Helping a fellow student locate a bug in their code
- Getting help with your code from an Instructor or a graduate tutor.
Your solution project will be checked for similarities with all other student solutions/projects. If your solution/project is found to be “substantially similar” to that of another student, or if it is determined that someone else wrote your project for you, then at a minimum you and the other student (if applicable) will receive a grade of zero for that assignment/project and in some series cases (such as in term projects) a 10 point deduction in your semester average. Furthermore, all parties concerned will have their prior projects re-checked for cheating. Any second incident will result in a grade of ‘F’ for the semester. Also, checking for cheating may occur at any time during the semester. Therefore, if you cheated on Project 1, you may be confronted about that at any time; receiving a grade for a project does not mean you are “in the clear”.
All incidents of academic misconduct will be reported to the University’s Academic Conduct Committee for further action, which may include, but is not limited to, academic suspension or dismissal from the university.
The UMBC academic integrity policy is available at https://academicconduct.umbc.edu/