I encourage you to study together: collaboration is at the basis of education. But, the homeworks, projects and exams of this course are used to measure your progress and to assign you a grade. Hence, the work that you turn in on both must be done by you alone.

You all know what cheating on a test means. For example, if you were to turn to your neighbor and ask "How should I approach this problem?" there would be no question that you were attempting to cheat. With homeworks, though, it is easier to rationalize improper behavior and harder to draw the line between collaboration and cheating.

For example, in Homework 1 I give you an algorithm for mutual exclusion and ask you whether it is safe and if it is live. Locking yourself in a room and working on it by yourself is clearly okay in terms of not cheating. Sitting down with a friend and working on it together is clearly cheating. But what if you're studying with a group and the topic of that question comes up? How much can you say before you've crossed the line between collaboration and cheating?

There are many rules of thumb you will hear. For example, Gary Cottrell likes the Gilligan's Island Rule: if you discuss a homework question with someone else, you should go watch a "Gilligan's Island" episode before working on the homework by yourself. (If you don't haunt the upper channels on the cable, you could substitute "Temptation Island 2" or "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" for "Gilligan's Island"). Geoff Voelker more simply advises that you don't write down your solutions while with other people: discuss, say, in the library and then go home to write up your assignment. Both address the same point: when you're writing up the assignment, you should be writing down your own solution.

If you are in doubt, ask me.

For the project, you will be working in teams of three people. The code you turn in should be the work of only your team members. Occasionally, we have desparate teams that don't complete the project and so copy another team's code, or steal their results, and so on. Obviously, this is cheating; what such a team turns in doesn't reflect their own work.

You're spending your time and money here to be learning. We take our careers seriously and want to use our time with you to help you learn a subject that we love. Cheating pulls us out of the job of education and into the job of policing. Some professors have abandoned using homeworks for grades and others have developed sophisticated tools to detect cheating. It's a lot of pain and grief. In addition, the penalty can be a zero on the homework, project, test, or course depending on its severity. We can also place a note about you cheating in your academic file, which can lead more serious problems with the univeristy. It's a miserable topic. Please, don't cheat.

Charles Elkan pulled together a well-written set of  academic honesty guidelines  for his CSE 130 class. They include pointers to the UC rules that govern us all. Please take some time to read them.

Please feel free to come talk with me about this issue; I'm always happy to discuss it.