Group Working

Collaboration can take place formally, when you are specifically asked to work in groups, and informally when you work with fellow students in a study group. We understand the value of students working together, which can provide significant help in learning, and frequently encourage you to set up informal study groups. For that reason, you need to understand the difference between collaboration and collusion. To successfully complete your degree you will need to ensure that collaborations (both formal and informal) are conducted with academic integrity.

Some assignments, labs, and projects are carried out in groups. For small tasks it will be assumed that everyone contributed equally

• if a member of your group is not doing their share of the work, you must tell the lecturer

For major pieces of work you will be asked to indicate your contribution and that of others

• keep a record of your contrubution (and that of your partners) in your log book

Outside Help

Occasionally you may ask a friend for help. They can go through the material to you, and try to clarify any misunderstandings, but what you submit must be your own work

• you must be able to explain it if asked to do so

If you copy or paraphrase some material from your friend’s solution you must declare this

• this is my own work except for <reference to material which is not your own> which I have copied from <name and id of person>

Similarly if you download code from the Internet

• this is my own code except for <details of downloaded code> which I have downloaded from <details of download source>

Collaboration or Collusion?

Working with other people, and maintaining your academic integrity is know as collaboration.Occasionally when you have worked on a problem together it is difficult to know who should get the credit,

You should declare what you have done

• this is my own work except for <detail of collaborative work> which and I developed together with <details of collaborative partner(s)>

If you don’t declare your collaboration, this is called collusion, since it appears that you are not informing anyone marking the work that you are submitting work which is not completely your own. In this case it will be treated as a breach of academic integrity.

Danger arises when people get so much help that the work ceases to be their own. Drawing a precise line between the kind of collaboration that is acceptable and the kind that is unacceptable is admittedly difficult. Nonetheless, it is possible to establish some clear guidelines:

• If you do not understand the solution you have submitted, you have certainly crossed a line into unacceptable territory. You are not learning, which is the entire point of the work having assignments in the first place. In the School, we reserve the right to ask students to explain the work they have submitted.
• If you have “borrowed” from someone else’s work to such an extent that you feel a need to “cover up your tracks” by changing variable names or rearranging the order of operations, you are clearly plagiarising according to the definition above.
• The fundamental principle of academic integrity is that whenever you make use of someone’s ideas, you should give credit for those ideas in the form of proper citation or acknowledgement.