Florida Tech Computer Sciences and Cybersecurity Honor Code

We believe that everyone has a right to work in an environment where people treat one another honestly and fairly. Because academic dishonesty can threaten this environment we will pursue abuses of the policies outlined below aggressively.

When you submit any piece of work for grading or other evaluation, the reader will assume that you are the sole author of all aspects of it. The expectation is that you are the originator of every idea and author of every sentence in an essay, help file, or other document, that you wrote every line of code, that you designed every data structure and created every piece of data. In practice, you will often have good reason to use other people's work or to collaborate with others in creating a work that you will submit. In these cases, it is your responsibility to make the reader clearly aware of what has come from other sources. If a reasonable reader would assume, on reading your work, that some part was created by you alone when in fact it was created by someone else or by you in partnership with someone else, that reader has been misled. It is your responsibility to prevent such misimpressions, and the department will hold students accountable both for intentionally misleading readers and for failing to prevent reasonable misimpressions.

Code Plagiarism

Computer science is a discipline where it is difficult to draw a precise line between acceptable and unacceptable collaboration. On the one hand we want to encourage you to try out other peoples' code; code reuse is an area of active research within computer science. On the other hand you will learn to write code only if you do it yourself. You are not learning and have crossed the line of acceptable behavior if you do not understand the solution you have submitted. We have the right to ask students to explain the code they submit. If you have "reused'' someone else's code to an extent that you feel a need to change variable names or slightly rearrange the order of statements, then you have also violated the honor code. We also reserve the right to use electronic tools to check code for plagiarism. By submitting code for grading in any computer science course, you grant the instructor a license to send a copy of that code for plagiarism analysis to a research service, such as MOSS. The instructor, or their service, may compare your code against other students' code, or compare their code to yours. Give credit to someone else's ideas with a citation rather than turning in their work as your own.

Text Plagiarism

When you hand in an essay or other writing assignment, you must give credit to your sources. You must provide a reference for any idea, conclusion, information or data that you got from another source (such as a book, an article on the Net, or a person). If you use someone's words, you must show that you are quoting them (use quotation marks or indent long quotes) and your reference should show your exact source (such as the page number of the article or book). If you quote someone, you must quote them accurately, word for word. To avoid plagiarizing, you might find the following articles useful:

• Academic Dishonesty, Cheating, and Plagiarism (pdf)
• How Not to Plagiarize
• Citing Sources and Avoiding Plagiarism
• Working with Sources

By submitting a writing assignment for grading in any computer science course, you grant the instructor a license to send a copy of that assignment for plagiarism analysis to a research service, such as TurnItIn. The instructor, or their service, may compare your paper against other students' papers, or compare their papers to yours.

If you cannot view pdf files, you can download Adobe Reader here.

Social Responsibility

Many people use our machines: students, faculty, staff, and outside visitors. Our machines affect other machines on and off campus and they affect the users of these machines. It is not hard to abuse others by mailing spam, flaming to newsgroups, being a cracker, displaying digital pornography, bogging down the CPU with processes, or hogging the printer. We expect your use of computer resources will be based on the Golden Rule: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Poor social responsibility because you are new is one thing, but malicious practices are another matter and will not be tolerated.

Right to Privacy

You are encouraged to store electronic property on computers provided for your use by Computer Sciences and Cybersecurity, and you have a privacy right to this information. Others also have a right of privacy to the property they store on our computers. You should not search other's file systems, read their mail, scan or remove their files, try to crack their password, login as someone else, intercept other's network traffic, install viruses, or otherwise violate the right to privacy of others. We will not intentionally abuse your right to privacy. However, to administer our machines we may need to do things you should not, for example, we may need to try to crack your password to verify that it is secure, or kill your processes, or remove your files, or read your email, or otherwise invade your privacy when we suspect you are an abuser of our systems.

Discrimination

It is the policy of the university that all students, faculty, staff, and guests enjoy an environment free from all forms of discrimination, including ethnic, racial, religious, and sexual harassment.

Disclaimers

The Florida Tech Acceptable Use Policy for Campus Information Technology Services. The Florida Tech Catalog, and the Student Handbook have additional guidelines on campus standards, behavior, discipline, complaint resolution, etc. The Computer Science Honor Code does not replace or supersede these polices. Faculty teaching computer science courses may establish other honor criteria for their classes.

As our machines are part of a larger international network, we assume certain responsibilities as a member of a growing electronic community. Exercising this responsibility may require us to search for suspected abusers of our or others computers. If you suspect that someone has violated your rights as a user of our machines, inform the systems administrator; do not attempt to track them down yourself.

Penalties

The following penalties are recommended for violation of this honor code.

Offense	Penalty	Reported To
First	Zero on work	Dean of Students
Second	F in course	University Disciplinary Committee
Third	Expulsion from program	University Disciplinary Committee

Ideas for this code of honor have been collected from other universities, most notably, Stanford University and the University of Florida.