Math 11, Academic Integrity Policy
"Integrity is doing the right thing even when no one is watching." -- C. S. Lewis
"The supreme quality for leadership is unquestionably integrity. Without it, no real success is possible." -- Dwight Eisenhower
It is essential that all Math 11 students adhere to the UCSD Policy on Integrity of Scholarship. More information about academic integrity at UC San Diego is available from the Academic Integrity Office.
Cases of academic dishonesty will be reported to the Academic Integrity Office. Penalties for violating the policy vary depending on the circumstances but can include failure in the course or suspension from the university. Students are expected to obey the following rules:
Exams: On exams, you are allowed to use Minitab, your textbook, any calculator (including an online calculator such as Wolfram Alpha), any class notes that you have made, your homework solutions, and all course materials that are available in Canvas.
You are not, however, permitted to communicate with other people while taking the exam, or to look for solutions to exam questions on the internet.
Homework: You may consult other students, the instructor, or the TAs (but no one else) while formulating your ideas on homework problems. However, you must do your own calculations, based on your own understanding. You may not copy solutions from another student or from any other source, and you must never view another student's homework answers or solutions.
Computer Labs: You may consult other students, the instructor, or TAs (but no one else) while formulating your ideas on the computer lab assignments. However, you must write your final lab solutions by yourself, based on your own understanding. You may not copy or paraphrase solutions from another student or from any other source, and you must never view another student's lab solutions. If you discuss the lab with other students, you must acknowledge this on your lab, and indicate on which problems you received help. Also, because one of the goals of the labs is to give students experience in working with statistical software, your lab write-ups must be based on calculations that you carried out in Minitab yourself. You may never send your Minitab graphs, or the text of your lab solutions, to another student.
Online Resources: You may look up general course topics on the internet, but you may not look for solutions to homework problems on the internet. In particular, you may not use web sites that help students with homework problems or provide online tutoring (except the online tutoring provided through the Teaching and Learning Commons).
Soliciting homework answers or solutions from online tutoring websites is a serious form of academic misconduct known as contract cheating, which, when discovered, typically results in suspension from the university. Also, you may not post about homework or computer lab assignments on online discussion boards or social media sites, unless specifically authorized by your instructor.
Distribution of Course Materials: You may not post your homework or lab solutions, or any other course materials, online where they could be found by future Math 11 students. You may never show your homework or computer lab solutions to future Math 11 students, or look at materials (such as homework or computer lab solutions) from previous Math 11 classes.
Plagiarism Detection: To ensure that students will not copy portions of their labs from other current or past Math 11 students, the software Turnitin.com will be used to detect plagiarism. Therefore, the following policy, quoted from UCSD's Academic Integrity web site, applies to Math 11:
"Students agree that by taking this course all required papers will be subject to submission for textual similarity review to Turnitin.com for the detection of plagiarism. All submitted papers will be included as source documents in the Turnitin.com reference database solely for the purpose of detecting plagiarism of such papers. Use of the Turnitin.com service is subject to the terms of use agreement posted on the Turnitin.com site."
Examples
Students sometimes have misconceptions about what is acceptable, especially with regard to obtaining help on homework problems. The scenarios below are intended to clarify some of the issues that can arise.
You are encouraged to ask your instructor if you have any questions concerning the academic integrity policy.
Scenario: You forget how to find a regression line in Minitab. You ask a classmate, who reminds you where the regression menu is. You go back to your computer and do the regression.
Analysis: This is acceptable. It is fine to ask for help with Minitab as long as you do the actual calculations yourself.
Scenario: You solve most of the homework problems yourself but get stuck on two of them. You explain your difficulties to your classmate, who makes some suggestions that you find useful without showing you her work or giving you the answer. You go home and write up correct solutions.
Analysis: This is acceptable because you wrote up your solutions independently.
Scenario: Your classmate forgot to make one of the graphs in Minitab that he needed, so you send him yours by email.
Analysis: This is cheating. You are violating the academic integrity policy by sending your graph to another student. Your classmate is violating the academic integrity policy by using a graph made by someone else.
Scenario: A friend who took Math 11 last year shows you her computer lab solutions to help you with a few questions on which you are stuck.
Analysis: This is cheating. You may never look at anyone else's homework or computer lab solutions, and you may never obtain materials from previous Math 11 students. Note that because the lab assignments change slightly from quarter to quarter, this sort of cheating is likely to be detected by the lab graders.
Scenario: Your classmate has finished her homework and shows you her solutions so that you can look them over before you submit your homework.
Analysis: This is cheating. It is never acceptable to be looking at another student's homework solutions.
Scenario: Three people work on a lab assignment together. They all contribute and acknowledge one another's help. Because they wrote their solutions together at the same time, their solutions are nearly identical.
Analysis: This is cheating. You must write your final solutions independently, in which case two or more people will never have lab solutions that look essentially the same.
Scenario: Because you are stuck on a homework or lab problem, you Google a sentence from the problem hoping to find some hints online.
Analysis: This is cheating. It would be acceptable to Google a general course topic such as "Bayes' rule" or "two-sample t-test", but it is never acceptable to look for answers to homework problems online.
Scenario: Because you are stuck on a homework problem, you ask the question at a website that provides online tutoring, making a few small changes to the problem so that it is not identical to the homework problem.
Analysis: This is contract cheating, likely to result in suspension from the university. Soliciting a homework solution online is among the most serious forms of academic misconduct. Even if you change the question to differ slightly from the homework problem, soliciting the solution from the online source is unacceptable.
Scenario: To help future Math 11 students, you decide to post your lab solutions to a popular website that accepts submissions of course materials.
Analysis: This is a violation of the academic integrity policy. While it is admirable to want to help other students learn, posting course materials online, where other students could find them with a Google search, primarily facilitates cheating rather than learning. It is important for all current and future Math 11 students to have the benefit of working through the homework and lab assignments on their own, without access to others' solutions.