Plagiarism policy
All projects are to be made strictly individually and on your own. This means that you must create your projects on an independent basis and you must be able to explain your work, reimplement it under supervision, and defend your solution. Copying work (e.g. code, text, benchmark results) from or sharing it with third parties (e.g. fellow students, websites, GitHub) is not allowed. Electronic tools will be used to compare all submissions with online resources and with each other, even across academic years.
You are allowed to use third-party code with source attribution. However, you will only be evaluated on the part of the work you did yourself. If third-party code is used to fulfill any part of the requirements of the project, you will not receive any points on that part of the project.
You are also allowed to use any code provided to you during the course, e.g. as part of the project assignment, in the lectures and exercise sessions, or in communications with the instructors.
What is plagiarism?
Any action by a student that deviates from the instructions given and does not comply with the examination regulations is considered an irregularity. Plagiarism is also an irregularity. Plagiarism means the use of other people’s work, adapted or otherwise, without careful acknowledgement of sources. (cf. OER, Article 118$2). Plagiarism may relate to various forms of works including text, code, images, etc.
What happens if plagiarism is suspected?
Any suspicion of plagiarism will be reported to the Dean of Faculty without delay. Both user and provider of such code will be reported and will be dealt with according to the plagiarism rules of the examination regulations (cf. OER, Article 118). The dean may decide on (a combination of) the disciplinary sanctions, ranging from 0/20 on the paper of the given programme unit to a prohibition from (re-)enrolling for one or multiple academic years (cf. OER, Article 118$5).
Examples
- If you consult the documentation of a programming language or tool to learn how to use a particular function, then you are not copying any code, so you do not need to cite anything. E.g. if you look up the file:open/2 function on erldocs.com to find out which arguments it expects, there’s no need to cite that documentation entry.
- If you copy a snippet of code, you need to cite your source. Add a link to the source in a comment in your code. For example, if you want to parse a CSV file in Erlang and copy code from a Stack Overflow answer, code on GitHub, or a blog post, you need to link to the source. {% comment %}(You should also check if you have the rights to copy the code, but that is a separate, legal issue. Code on Stack Overflow is published under a permissive Creative Commons BY-SA license.){% endcomment %}
- If you copy a code snippet and have correctly cited your source, you have not committed plagiarism. However, we disregard this code when grading your project, because we only grade your own part of the code. So, copying code to parse a CSV file is okay: this is not a requirement of the project and thus this part of the code doesn’t contribute to your score anyway. However, if you for example copy code to spawn different processes and distribute a set of users over it: that piece of code is implementing a requirement of the project, and therefore we cannot give you any points for that requirement. So don’t do that!
It’s okay to talk about general concepts or algorithms with your fellow students, but don’t share pseudocode or code. The best way to do this is to avoid talking to others about the program while you are at the computer, and to never send each other snippets of code. If you get stuck, do not ask for help from your fellow students, but either use debugging tools or ask the instructor or teaching assistant for help. We are happy to help you!
If you are unsure if something is allowed or have questions about this policy, please contact the instructor.