If you have any questions about what anything on this page means, ask me right away. If I have to investigate a cheating case, this entire page will be attached as part of the evidence, along with your signed statment that you understood it. So you do not want to say say any of these things to me. Or to the Associate Dean of Science, or to President's Committee on Discipline. Or to your parents, after you get suspended for cheating. Or to the person interviewing you for a job after you finish school, who asks about why your transcript has an academic misconduct notation.
Me: It's your job to know what's cheating and what's not. In most intro
classes we go into great detail on the first day about what counts as
cheating and what does not.
In most undergrad classes every single assignment that you turn in has
a statement that the material you are handing in is your own work.
If you take a class from me, you will need to turn in a statement that
you have read through this page in detail and completely understand
it. If there is anything here that you do not fully understand ask me
immediately, before you turn in this statement.
Me: It's your job to find out what was covered in lecture and labs if you
miss or skip them. That's just as true for course expectations on
cheating as it is on content. On an exam you don't get to write "I
shouldn't have to answer this question because I skipped class the day
you talked about it"!
The information is on the course web site
for you to see at any time.
Me: Really bad excuse. It's your responsibility to know. That's
like saying "I know you said something about having a midterm at the start of
the term, but I forgot which day you said it would be. So it's not
my fault that I didn't show up."
Me: Cheating might seem like a way to help your friend if
you only think about it in the short term, but in the longer term
you're hurting not helping. Just giving your friends the answers
means that they don't learn the material, and then they'll do
even worse later: on the exam, or in the next course, or in their
next job. And at that point it will be much harder for them to
learn how to do it because they'll be so far behind. Same for just
getting the answers from your friend: you've just made your own
life worse later on.
A true friend helps by actually teaching the material so that
it's understood, not just giving them the answers.
Me: It's a really big deal. The consequences of cheating are much, much
worse than getting a low mark for that particular item of work. The
very best case is that you get a zero for the whole thing. In
every case I've ever seen, turning in your own work would have
at least gotten you a few marks, better than a zero.
And that's the best case. If I decide that the cheating was
serious enough that I refer the case upwards for disciplinary
action, the potential consequences include:
Me: Bad idea.
It's much better to turn in nothing - or partially completed work that
you did yourself - than to cheat. When we catch you cheating, the
minimum penalty is that you get a zero for the work in question. The
maximum penalty is much much worse, like failing the course or being
suspended. It's not worth whatever percentage of your grade the work
is worth. I've heard student say things like this many times:
"If only I had understood the consequences I never would have done
it. To end up suspended over an assignment that was only worth 2%
of my grade is so dumb."
UBC has many resources to help you, including the Science Peer Academic Coach
(SPAC) program. They offer workshops on time management, and the
Coaches' Corner in the Chapman Learning Commons welcomes drop-in or
scheduled visits.
Me: Giving answers is cheating. It's true that we usually consider handing in work that is not your own to be even worse than giving answers out, but both are cheating. Both will get you involved in the academic misconduct process. Both have bad consequences. If nobody gave out answers, the rate of cheating would be much, much lower.
Me: I don't enjoy prosecuting cheating cases: it's horribly depressing and
eats up a huge amount of time for me and many other people up the
chain: in the CS department, at the Dean's office, and at the
President's Committee level. It's also
deeply traumatic for the student involved. But I do it when I find
cheating, because it's important to have a level playing field. I do
not want students to think they have to cheat just in order to keep up
with everybody else, or nobody will learn anything.
Me: While it's true that we're busy and overworked, we are not idiots and
we do this for a living. The odds are high that we will find out.
First, I structure marking so that it's likely we'll notice
cheating. Whenever possible, I distribute the work so that one person
marks the entire batch, so that it's more like that it will get
noticed. Many cheating cases begin when a TA tells me about unusual and
notable similarities.
Second, we are computer scientists: we can write and use programs
to check for copying. The same technology that lets us write compilers
will let us find structural similarities. Changing the variable names
won't help. Stripping out or changing the comments won't help. Making
minor little tweaks won't help. Changing the whitespace won't help. We
can run these programs on everything submitted in the term. We can
also run them against solutions from previous terms.
Of course, if a program detects a similarity, that is evidence of
possible wrongdoing but not proof. I do not blindly prosecute based on
these results, but they do guide my investigations.
Me: No, not at all, there any many right answers! Programming is much more like
creative writing than like a math problem set. If you are a weak
student and you see somebody else's work, you might not think there's
any other way to do it. But in fact there is. Even in a function of
only a few lines, there is often room for significant differences. In
a full program, it's very idiosyncratic and no two programs are
identical.
I regularly submit as evidence in cheating cases the output of
a file difference program comparing between the programs submitted
by a pair of students accused of cheating, and between a few
randomly selected pairs of students. The differences between the
random pairs are massive, so the cheating case stands out as being
extremely obvious.
There are also many wrong answers. One of the ways we notice cheating
is when two submissions do something really bizarre and wrong that's
identical.
Me: Wrong answer. In team-based assignments, you are completely
responsible for everything that was turned in that includes your name as
one of the authors. If your partner cheats, you definitely can and
will be punished.
If the course allows working in pairs or teams, do not just
split up the work and work independently and never talk to each other!
First, of all, even leaving cheating out of it, the point is to learn
all the material, not just your part. With pair programming, we are
explicitly allowing you to work closely with somebody and discuss the
material at a deep level in order to help you learn more and do
stronger work. One of the reasons that we allow and encourage pair
programming in many courses is exactly to help you learn in this way
without labelling that behavior as cheating: that's how a lot of
technical work is done in the working world. But we have imposed the
constraint that you can only do this within your designated team -
also just like working in the real world, where people all have their
own work to do and you need to pull your own weight. Splitting up the
work into pieces and then cheating by doing your piece with somebody
who is not your partner is doing it exactly backwards!
You must make sure that any work with your name on it is
legitimate. At minimum, that means you must understand what was done
enough that you can verify that your partner really did do the work.
You should be suspicious if your partner suddenly catapults from
struggling to even get started to having a complete solution, with
nothing in between; asking questions about how it works it is a
good way not only to learn the material, but also to check that
your partner can explain it.
Me: Bad, bad idea. Once you have given your work to somebody
else, you have no control over what happens. Your friends might have
simply been lying, and intended to turn your work in as their own all
along. Your friends might send the code to yet another person who is
not so trustworthy, for example their partner if it's a pair
programming assignment, or another friend. There are many examples of
people who did not mean to cheat, but
ended up doing so anyway. Your friends might give in to temptation in a
moment of desperate weakness right before the deadline. Your friends
might be such weak students that they submit your code instead of
theirs by mistake. Heck, some cheaters are so incompetent that they
even forget to change your name to their own, making it particularly
easy to spot the misconduct. I have seen all of these scenarios
actually happen. Don't let your own academic career be held hostage to
somebody else's judgement: never give your work to somebody else.
Me: No it's not; yes I will; yes I can. Those sites have self-appointed
watchers who look for suspicious posts where somebody is asking for
coursework to be done, and they send email directly to the professors.
It's happened to me and to other professors as well. When this
happened to me I did indeed take the time to figure out exactly who the culprit was, and
proved it beyond the shadow of a doubt. The penalty imposed by the President's Committee was suspension for 2 full years.
Me:
Don't cheat, come get help in the right way! Come to my office
hours. If those times don't work for you, send me email to set up
another time, I do this all the time. Come to the TA office hours.
Try going to a different TA's office/lab hours to see if an
alternate explanation style works better for you. If you're having
problems getting enough help from the TAs because office/lab hours
are too busy, let me know! We often have some flexibility for
adding more support if it's needed. Ask for help and we will do
our best to help you learn the material if you're willing to put
the time and effort into it.
It's also legitimate to ask your friends who are in the
course now or who have taken it before for help in the appropriate
ways, as discussed in the policies for the specific course. Do
remember that in many courses, I ask that you acknowledge who you
had these discussions with in writing.
Me:
Your parents will be even more disappointed in you for cheating than
for poor marks. Imagine having to explain to them why you've been
suspended for one or two terms.
Me: That's a bad idea on so many levels! First, if the
only way you can pass this course is to cheat, you should not pass.
Passing isn't a gift from me to you, a gold star to make you feel
good: it is a certification that you understand the stuff. It's
completely counterproductive to cheat to pass a course, because you'll
just fail the next course - they build on each other! If you don't
know the material, you need to take the course again in order to learn
it.
And, as I discuss above, the consequences of getting caught are
usually worse than simply failing the course. For example, the potential penalty
of getting a mark of zero for the course will be much worse for
your GPA than a failing mark of 30 or 40! Penalities like suspension
or notations of misconduct on your transcript are definitely worse
than failing.
And if somehow you manage to cheat your way all the way through
school and not get caught, you'll get burned later when you try to get
a job because you didn't actually learn the stuff that you're supposed
to know. Lots of employers try hard to screen candidates by asking
questions during interviews, before they hire you, to make sure you
really know what you claim to know. And if you do manage to get hired
into a job where you're expected to know this stuff - you won't know
how to do it. The odds are high that your boss will eventually notice
and you'll end up fired.
Me: It doesn't matter what the thing you need is: admission
into a specific program/major, a scholarship, continued
residency in the country, your parents' approval, a job,
admission into graduate school. Cheating is a bad way to get
it. Marks are not a gift from me to you. They are something
that you earn, and they certify a specific level of
understanding of the material. That's true not only for passing
vs failing the course, but also for higher levels of success. A
mark showing that you have achieved excellence is often used by
people who are selecting strong candidates based on your
academic performance.
In addition to all the practical reasons why cheating to avoid failure are a bad idea and the
many bad consequences that
result from getting caught, cheating to
get something that you want is dishonest and morally wrong. Your
integrity is precious; so is your reputation. Do not squander your
personal honor.
Me: Moments of weakness are yet another reason why it's a
very bad idea to have anybody else's work in your possession. You
might have seriously intended to do the work yourself, and promised
yourself that you'd only use their answers to check your own work -
but then you got busy, and now the due date is here, and you give in
to temptation. And then the consequences of that moment of weakness
can significantly mess up your life.
Me: No. Life happens,
circumstances such as "I was under stress in my personal life"
or "I got sick and missed classes" or "I just lost my
part-time job" or "my grandparent is ill" are not a reason to
cheat.
You should think about ways of handling these stresses that don't
involve cheating. UBC has academic advisors in each faculty
who can help you figure about how to handle stresses; it's
often good to think about the big picture of all of your
courses, instead of just each class individually. At the class
level, if you see that you're definitely going to miss a
deadline, I'm more open to creative workarounds if you come
discuss it with me in advance than if you don't talk to me
until after it was due.
Me: You should have thought long and hard about about that
before you chose to cheat. Your actions have
consequences that are your responsibility, not mine. It will
not help to tell me now that the consequences resulting from
your actions will be bad for you - whether it's messing up
your academic plans, or causing financial hardship for you or
your family, or causing you immigration/visa problems.