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Honor Code Policy:


Your honor cannot be taken from you; you can only give it up voluntarily yourself.

All your work on quizzes, exams, and all submitted material, is governed by the Union College Honor Code. This means that the faculty at Union trust you to perform your work within the parameters that they have specified; thus they will not impose cumbersome security measures to force you to do your work properly, but it also means that the responsibility falls to you to work honorably and not break that trust. It should be an honor to fullfil the principles of academic honesty, and your signature on the honor affirmation indicated that you have acted in accord with those principles. I take this very seriously, and you should as well.

You will be asked to sign the honor statement on all quizzes and exams in this course. You can use the short-hand version

I affirm that I have carried out my academic endeavors with full academic honesty.
followed by your signature. I will have this printed on all the quizzes and exams, and you should include it on any work that you submit, even if I haven't written it out explicitly.

The quizzes and exams are closed-book, unless otherwise indicated. This means you may not consult your notes, the textbook, the internet, your phone, other students, your parents, or any other resource other than your brain. While I can not prevent you from using these, it is your personal honor that is at stake if you choose not to follow the rules and sign the affirmation anyway. I hope that you will not lightly compromise something of that importance. Your honor cannot be taken from you; you can only give it up vountarily yourself.

Historically, homework is the portion of the course where students have the most difficulty understanding how the honor code applies. You should use the following paragraphs to help clarify the expectations as they apply to this course. Note that these may not be the same expectations that you will have in other courses or with other instructors.

Although it is to your advantage to do your work yourself, you may discuss the homework problems with each other. You should not, however, work out all the details together, and if you do work with others on homework that is turned in, you must cite the other students who were involved, and make a brief explanation of the roles each student played in the process. Doing so is what allows collaboration while still fulfilling the requirements of the honor code.

When you do work together, you should each write up your own solutions independently. That does not mean that you should both simply copy out the same thing; rather, it means that you can work together to develop ideas, but should organize and present those ideas independently. You should not work out every detail together; that is, when you have finished working with someone, there should still be some coordination left for you. If your papers look substantially the same at the end, you have worked together too closely.

To make this effective, I have the following rule about working with others: you may not take any written material away from a collaboration. You can write down all you want when you are together, but you must throw it all away before you separate. This will encourage you to rethink the material when you write it up. If the collaboration was successful (and you learned something from it), you should be able to reproduce those ideas on your own. If not, then you have not really learned from the collaboration, and should not receive credit for work that you don't actually understand well enough to describe independently.

Please read the comments on collaboration from my advice pages.



[HOME] Math 199 (Fall 2020) web pages
Created: 01 Sep 2020
Last modified: 02 Sep 2020 12:58:00
Comments to: dpvc@union.edu
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