Plagiarism and Fraud at Carleton

Updated: 2006-01-20 12:00

Re-use of code and solutions is normally a mark of a good IT professional; however, copying solutions from other people or places (even from the blackboard!) and submitting them under your own name as your own ideas constitutes academic fraud: plagiarism.

Unless you are specifically assigned to a project team where sharing is required, you must learn to solve your own problems.  You may not copy and submit solutions from someone else.  You may not "work together" on a problem.  Use of a solution belonging to another person is an academic offence with penalties for everyone involved, both the author and the recipients.

Definition of Plagiarism

http://www.carleton.ca/cuuc/regulations/acadregsuniv14.html

Plagiarism is presenting, whether intentional or not, the ideas, expression of ideas or work of others as one's own. Plagiarism includes reproducing or paraphrasing portions of someone else's published or unpublished material, regardless of the source, and presenting these as one's own without proper citation or reference to the original source. Examples of sources from which the ideas, expressions of ideas or works of others may be drawn from include but are not limited to: books, articles, papers, literary compositions and phrases, performance compositions, chemical compounds, art works, laboratory reports, research results, calculations and the results of calculations, diagrams, constructions, computer reports, computer code/software, and material on the Internet.
Plagiarism is defined as:
Material submitted by the student, claimed as the student's own work, that is substantially the work of one or more other people.  If you put your name on a solution and submit it as your own assignment, that solution must be your own independent work.  If you "worked together" on the solution, or if the solution was copied from someone else (including from your teacher), putting your own name on it is academic fraud: plagiarism.

Plagiarised material may come from such places as other student disks, source listings, textbook examples, the Internet, and even the classroom blackboard or other posted course notes. For most assignments, no copying of any material, published or otherwise, is permitted.  You may not "work together" on an assignment.  You may not copy material from the blackboard or from course notes and claim that you wrote it by putting your name on it.  You may only put your name on solutions that you write.

Penalties for Plagiarism

BIT/NET students are subject to the academic rules and regulations of Carleton University, even while taking courses at Algonquin College.

Students should note that there are significant differences between the academic regulations of Carleton University and Algonquin College; it is the regulations of Carleton University that apply in all cases as related both to course registrations and program rules.

Carleton University has severe penalties for people who claim authorship of material they did not write. Read the Academic Regulations Section E-14:

Any student found in violation of these regulations may be:
  1. expelled;
  2. suspended from all studies at the University;
  3. suspended from full-time studies; and/or:
  4. awarded a reprimand;
  5. refused permission to continue or to register in a specific degree program but subject to having met all academic requirements shall be permitted to register and continue in some other program;
  6. placed on Academic Warning;
  7. awarded an F or Abs in a course or examination.

Students who knowingly allow their work to be copied (by lending diskettes or source listings, or by leaving their account directories unprotected) will receive the same penalties and sanctions as the plagiariser.  Do not share your disks or listings with other students.  Do not "help" other students by giving them your solutions.  Protect your account directories; do not share your computer accounts.

Share your ideas, not your solutions.

I recommend reading lots of other programs and solutions to problems. I do not permit copying any of them and handing in the copy as your own work.  If you find you must get help or refer to other published solutions to solve a problem for an assignment, study the other example to understand how it works and then put it away.  Write your own solution to the problem without referring to the example.

In those cases where you are authorized to incorporate code from other people into an assignment solution, or where your solution is an authorized modification to someone else's code (including code supplied by your instructor), you must credit the origin of the copied material.  Do not copy the material and claim it as your own original work.  You must give credit for all material that is not your own work, no matter what its origin (even the classroom blackboard!).  Do not put your name on someone else's work.

Share your ideas, not your solutions.


Web Author: Ian! D. Allen idallen@idallen.ca

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