Computer Systems Lab
Academic Integrity Standards

  • All courses and research lab sections (including the Mentorship Program) will operate under the standards defined by the school regarding academic integrity. To maximize individual learning it is important for each student to engage independently and actively in the activities and assignments that are designed to help students learn and develop skills related to this instructional area. When students present answers, assignments, or research that is not from their own intellectual processing, the learning process is not complete and cannot be assessed accurately.

    Below are guidelines:

    Group Work vs. Individual Work

    1. All students are to complete assignments individually (each student completes and turns in their own paper) unless the assignment has been specifically designated as a group activity where a group report may be submitted.

    2. No homework, classwork, reports, programs, portions of programs may be copied from another student.

    3. For group work, any student maintains the right to submit their own paper or program if they disagree with the results of their group.

    4. Limits of Collaboration. Students may collaborate on homework and classwork assignments only so as to share an approach to solving a problem or a method of analysis. But each student solves their own problems and completes their own analyses. Final answers to written reports and programs may be discussed, but each student must submit an individual version clearly showing their own derivation and approach.

      As an example of this method, it is expected that each student will make a first attempt to solve all assignments on their own. If a student cannot figure out how to begin a solution to a specific program or assignment, that student may inquire from others what general approach they used, but then must try that approach on their own so as to individually practice the skill.

    5. There is to be no collaboration or sharing of information of any kind or by any means on tests.

    6. Students are not to pass on to later students or to receive notebooks prior students who have completed the course notebooks, assignments, tests, etc.

    Plagiarism

  • Plagiarism is using the ideas and/or words from other sources without clearly acknowledging the source of that information. For reports, presentations, and other assignments, students should write their own paper or presentation to present their own ideas, programs, and research results. However, they are highly encouraged to include information from other sources to help support their own ideas with outside information. The information derived from other sources should not be the substance of the student paper unless the paper is intended to be a review of outside literature. Copyrighted information may not be copied, displayed, or transmitted in any way without written permission of the copyright holder. However, copyright laws allow limited use for educational purposes without prior permission.

    To avoid plagiarism, you must give credit as a citation whenever you use

    1. an idea, opinion, or theory from another person or source.
    2. a fact, statistic, graph, drawing, image, or other information that is not held in common knowledge; common knowledge is information found in many places and known by many people.
    3. images and/or text copied from the Internet.
    4. a direct quotation from someone else’s written or spoken word.
    5. a paraphrase of information from another source. A paraphrase is the rewriting of someone else's idea or information in your own words, but it's source must still be cited.

    To cite a reference use a citation. This is accomplished by putting a detailed and correct listing in a bibliography of the source and then a brief citation everywhere the source is used.

    For example, a paper bibliography might contain a listing such as, 

    Davies, E. R..  Machine Vision, Third Ed.  New York: Elsevier Publishers, 
	2005, pp. 131-132.
    Borrowed information may then appear in a student paper if it is cited as follows:

    "Edge detection has gone through an evolution spanning more than 30 years. Two main methods of edge detection have been apparent over this period, the first of these being template matching and the second being the differential gradient approach." (Davies, 131)

    Further examples and information can be found at the following websites: