Partner Policy

Assignments A4 and A5 permit a partner. Here are the policies governing those partnerships.

• A partner means one other person, besides yourself.

• Having a partner is completely optional.

• Your partner may be from any discussion section. It does not have to be your own section.

• You are free to work with different partners on each assignment. Make sure to acknowledge any past partners whose work might have influenced your own in the Authors interface.

• If you work with a partner, you must do all the work together. It is against the rules to split up the work, or to have one person do it and another person “check” it, or to have one person write the code and another person write the tests, etc. When you submit as a partnership, you are asserting that all the work was done together.

• The above rule has implications for Academic Integrity. If one of you is guilty, both of you are guilty. Consider that carefully. If your partner went off and implemented a lot of code “on their own,” how do you know they wrote it? Every year, it turns out somebody actually copied the code from elsewhere. You will be culpable if your partner does this, because by submitting as a partnership you are claiming the code to be jointly written by both of you.

• Nonetheless, much like exceeding the speed limit on the highway, if you’re going to violate the rules, there are norms. On the highway, that means speeding in the left lane, and sticking to the speed limit in the right lane. In this class, we likewise know some people will violate the rules and split the work anyway. So if you do that, make sure to detail in the Authors interface who did what work. That is your best defense should an Academic Integrity violation be detected.