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CIS 1100 is a challenging course that requires a substantial amount of time for most students. Many of you are learning a new kind of abstraction (algorithmic thinking), a new way to express procedures (programming), and a new level of discipline in thought (precision and rigor). Working through the assignments, encountering errors and bugs, and finding the solutions yourself are absolutely essential to learning these skills. To this end, CIS 1100 institutes and enforces a strict collaboration policy to ensure that all students are learning effectively. Suspected violations of this policy are systematically referred to the Office of Student Conduct, and generally incur both a disciplinary sanction and a grade deduction.

This semester, we will be providing dozens of hours of support per week. We urge students to take advantage of all of the tools available (Office Hours, Review Sessions, or reaching out for additional support if needed) so that the incentive to violate collaboration policies remains as low as possible.

On the homework assignments, we use automated “cheat-checking” software to help detect plagiarism and inappropriate collaboration. This software is very, very effective. We are able to reliably detect all sorts of violations beyond just direct copying from another student or source. According to the Annual Report of the Penn Office of Student Conduct, there were 127 referrals for undergraduate academic misconduct in 2013–2014. 55 of these cases, or nearly 45%, were referred from CIS 1100. By taking the collaboration policy as seriously as the course staff does, you will not only help reduce this number, but you will also help yourself and your fellow students learn more effectively.


Collaboration Policy


Penalties for Violation of Collaboration Policy

The role of the CIS 1100 course staff is to educate students about Computer Science. The following penalties are designed to disincentivize plagiarism and improper collaboration. The basic principle is that you will not receive credit for work that you did not individually generate.

The staff is not invested in or responsible for investigations of the cases beyond the details that we first detect. Neither are the instructors interested in notions of punitive justice. To that end, CIS 1100 leans heavily on the Office of Student Conduct for contested or repeated cases. You can learn more about their processes, and their emphasis on restorative practices on their website.

As instructors, we make no guarantees about the timeline for discovering and notifying the student about violations. As a result, we may notify students of a first and a second violation at the same time. Additionally, we reserve the right to apply harsher penalties for first violations in egregious cases (direct letter-for-letter plagiarism, stealing another student’s laptop, etc.).


Collaboration Policy (Annotated)

This annotated version of the policy includes many examples and elaborations to help you understand how to interpret the rules. It covers many situations that have come up in past semesters, but it is not exhaustive.

These restrictions may seem artificial. After all, in the real world, computer scientists and programmers collaborate freely all the time, and so do CIS majors. In many upper-level CIS classes as well as in industry, looking up answers online, debugging code together, and sharing code are all permitted and encouraged. However, these behaviors are forbidden in CIS 1100: CIS 1100 is not an upper-level class, and it is not the real world. These restrictions help you learn.


Appropriate collaboration

The collaboration policy sounds scary because we take it very seriously. But it is not meant to prohibit all discussion and collaboration. It is intended to limit only the forms of collaboration that undermine the learning goals of the course. Here are some ways that we encourage you to work together and to get help: