Siddharth Mangalik

CSE 150
Academic Honesty Review
August 27, 2014

Question 1
Explain why copying (or approximately copying) solutions from the web (or another source) is plagiarism, even if you cite your source.
By coping another persons work and not substantiating its inclusion you have
failed to share any of your own original ideas and have instead passed in work
done by someone else as your own. Even paraphrasing falls into this category
when you are not synthesizing or analyzing the source and are only passing in
an abbreviated version.
Question 2
Explain why it is academically dishonest to share your solution set with another
student. Explain how you could get burned from just sharing your writeup even
if you do not copy yourself.
Not only is it hard to prove that you are not the one who copied work but you
have also placed yourself in a position of enabling plagiarism. Likewise when
the assignment is passed in, the student who has not properly understood the
assignment will likely copy your work verbatim, making their work all the more
incriminating and obviously plagiarism.
Question 3
Explain why we let students work together to solve problems, as long as the students cite their collaborators. Explain why it is plagiarism to share and/or copy
other write-ups.
Allowing students to work together lets them collate their collective knowledge
on a subject, and by working in groups the members can share their personal
strengths to help another student who might not have been as capable of completing a task without instruction or guidance. However copying or replicating
another students work is direct plagiarism and involves passing in work that
was not completed by yourself.
Question 4
Explain why it is better for your grade to leave a question blank, rather than
search for answers on the web. (Hint: calculate approximately how much a
homework problem is worth to your raw score versus an exam question.) Explain why this is true regardless of whether you are actually caught plagiarizing.
On more than a purely ethical and moral level, cheating on an assignment can
only be detrimental to your future success. Problem sets are worth exactly half
as much as an exam grade. Leaving a question blank on an assignment and then
following through to learn missing material will pay off on the exam. Whether
you get away with cheating or not, not learning the material by becoming reliant
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on outside sources will result in a lack of actual and recallable knowledge.

Question 5
How much time did this writeup take you, including learning how to use latex?
It took me about an hour to setup WinEdt and MikTex in itself, including the
amount of load times for downloading, installing, and opening packages. Learning to use the editor was generally smooth once I found sources and examples of
proper tags. The actual writeup only took about half an hour and was definitely
the easiest part of the assignment.