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.

• Unauthorized collaboration on written assignments: 2 students
• Copying solutions to written assignments from past classes: 2 students
• Unauthorized collaboration on coding assignments: 11 students
• Copying solutions to coding assignments from the internet: 15 students
• Copying on an exam: 4 students

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

• During exams, students may not sit next to their friends or people from their study group. This policy is intended to eliminate misunderstandings where students are suspected of copying from their neighbors when in fact the similarity in their answers is due to studying together. To avoid such similarities, sitting next to a friend or person from your study group during an exam will be considered a violation of academic integrity, and result in a grade of zero on the exam.
• The penalty for copying will be doubled for students who do not reveal their source when asked. Investigating a suspicion of copying can involve substantial time and effort in tracing the source. To cut down on this time, students are required to reveal the source when asked. Copying generally results in a grade of zero on the assignment, but if a student fails to reveal the source and I later find the source on my own, the student will receive double the penalty. This applies regardless of whether the student admits to copying.
• Any attempt to fool automatic plagiarism detection will result in an automatic failing grade in the class. The modification of code to reduce its similarity to the source, in order to avoid automatic detection, is considered a worse violation of academic integrity than just copying. While copying code generally results in a grade of zero on the assignment, any deliberate attempt to avoid detection will result in a failing grade in the class.

Assignments and exams include notices such as the following.

• This is an individual assignment. You may not work in teams or collaborate with other students. You must be the sole author of 100% of the code you turn in.
• You may not look for solutions on the web, or use code you find online or anywhere else.

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:

• Never send your code to another student, even just for the purpose of comparing results. If your code performs better than that of your classmate, they may ask you to run it on their machine just to see if it achieves the same performance. But once your code is on their machine, will they resist the temptation to use portions of your code to improve their program?
• Never receive code from another student, even just for the purpose of comparing results. If your classmate’s code performs better than yours, you may want to run it on your machine just to see if it achieves the same performance. But once their code is on your machine, will you resist the temptation to use portions of their code to improve your program?
• Never post your code for a graded assignment to a publicly accessible repository. I encourage students to use good software practices like version and source control, and cloud services such as GitHub and BitBucket are excellent ways to do so. However, for graded assignments you should make sure that your code is private, not public. If you make it public then someone else might find it, and you could be accused of copying or facilitating copying.

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.