University of Southern California

CSCI 544 — Applied Natural Language Processing


Academic integrity

When I taught CSCI 544 in Spring 2017, 34 students had their grades reduced for violations of academic integrity, including one who failed the class due to multiple violations. Here is the breakdown of academic integrity violations in Spring 2017.

In light of the above, I have initiated the following new policies, which are designed to reduce cheating.

Assignments and exams include notices such as the following.

Students must follow these guidelines, and any other instructions that are part of the assignments. Note that “You may not look for solutions” applies not just to verbatim copying of code, but to any attempt to find an external source for the solution. Sometimes students are unclear on the difference between using external resources for learning general language functionality (which is allowed), and looking for external solutions to the assignment. However, the boundary should be clear: consulting a resource to learn how to read and write files, perform bitwise math operations, increment an item in a dictionary, and so on are allowed; consulting an implementation of a Hidden Markov Model is not.

Some tips to avoid issues with academic integrity:

I report all academic integrity violations. Violations by graduate students are reported to the Viterbi Academic Integrity Coordinator, and violations by undergraduate students are reported to the Office of Student Judicial Affairs and Community Standards (SJACS). I follow the university procedures to the letter. There will be no negotiation, no bargaining, no makeup assignments, and no informal resolutions in cases of academic integrity violations. Also, once a violation has been reported, the instructor may not assign a grade until the individual case is resolved. Since many of the violations last year took place near the end of the semester, this meant that the grades of the students involved were delayed beyond the end of the semester.

I hope this note conveys the importance I attach to academic integrity, and the consequences for violating it. Let’s all work towards a productive, fruitful and honest semester.