We have chosen to move the burden of assessment of students' knowledge of programming concepts and skills from homework assignments to in-class exams. Homework assignments are now opportunities for learning and discovery; they are not instruments of evaluation. (In fact, the only reason homework assignments are considered in the final grade is to motivate students to work on the assignments.)
Because homework assignments are now not used for assessment, we can now greatly relax the constraints on collaboration with respect to these assignments. Effective this semester, any and all forms of collaboration between students in CS 1371 are permitted, including the sharing of solutions if that is what is needed for a student to learn to develop a working solution to a given homework problem.
As has always been the case, however, plagiarism is not allowed. If you use sources other than those provided for everyone in the course (i.e., instructors, teaching assistants, the textbook, the course web site, the course newsgroups, the lectures, or the recitations), you must give appropriate credit to those sources. Note that so long as you give credit where credit is due, your grade will not be affected nor will you be charged with academic misconduct. On the other hand, a failure to 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 give credit where credit is due, we now 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
"I worked on this homework with, used solutions or partial solutions provided by , and referred to ."
From now on, no set of homework solutions will be graded if it does not include a collaboration statement.
Furthermore, while the sharing of solutions is now permitted, unsolicited sharing of solutions is not acceptable. Many students do not want to see a solution to a problem until they have worked out their own solution. For that reason, we must insist that you do not share your solutions with another student unless that student has asked you to do so. In addition, you are not to post solutions to the course newsgroups or any other public forum for any reason.
If you have any questions about this new collaboration policy, please do not hesitate to ask your instructor, either in person or via email.