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We have chosen to move the assessment of students' knowledge of course concepts and skills from homework assignments to in-class exams. Homework assignments are opportunities for learning and discovery; they are not instruments of evaluation. (In fact, homework assignments are considered in the final grade simply to motivate students to work on the assignments.)

Because homework assignments are now not used for assessment, we greatly relax the constraints on collaboration with respect to these assignments. Effective this semester, collaboration between students in CS 1322 in permitted. Collaboration includes students working together to gain an understanding of course concepts, active discussions with teaching assistants and other people to learn about course material, and other activities in which a student is actively seeking to learn and understand the topics covered in the course. We do expect that you understand and can explain any homework solution that you submit, no matter how you worked on it.

As has always been the case, however, plagiarism is not allowed. Taking assignments from other classmates or downloading completed assignments from websites are not allowed. These are activities that are simply meant to earn a score, not understand our course material.

If you collaborate with other students in class or use sources other than those provided for everyone in the course (e.g., instructors, teaching assistants, the textbook, the course web site, the course newsgroups, the lectures, or the recitations) to help yourself learn and understand, then you must give appropriate credit to those collaborators and/or sources. As long as you acknowledge the collaboration that occurred, your grade will not be affected nor will you be charged with academic misconduct. On the other hand, a failure to acknowledge collaborations or give appropriate credit to sources of help (other than course materials or personnel as noted above) will be treated as plagiarism, a violation of Georgia Tech's Student Conduct Code.

To ensure that you acknowledge a collaboration and give credit where credit is due, we require that you place a collaboration statement at the beginning of every set of homework solutions you submit. That collaboration statement should say either:

"I worked on the homework assignment alone, using only course materials."

or

"In order to help learn course concepts, I worked on this homework with [give the names of the people you worked with], discussed homework topics and issues with [provide names of people], and/or consulted related material that can be found at [cite any other materials not provided as course materials for CS 1322 that assisted your learning]."