Collaboration boundary
Discuss high-level ideas and credit people you discussed with, but do not look at, share, or copy code solutions.
Programming exercises are best solved through individual effort. This is different from preparing for pre-university exams. To succeed professionally, you need to develop your own mental models, abstractions, and problem-solving strategies.
What You May Do
You may discuss high-level ideas with your friends.
If a discussion helps you with an assessment, credit the people you spoke with. For example, you can include their names in C comments in your code. This is good professional and academic etiquette.
What You Must Not Do
Do not:
- look at another person’s code;
- share your code snippets with others; or
- copy and paste code from another person or an online source. Write the code yourself.
Our experience and data show that students whose exercise submissions are highly similar to other students’ submissions tend to perform poorly in practical exams.
A Useful Rule of Thumb
Consider following the “Gilligan Island Rule”. After discussing a problem with someone, spend 30 minutes doing a mind-numbing activity. Then return to the exercise without referring to notes from the discussion.
This helps you check whether you understood the discussion well enough to reconstruct the solution yourself.