First, you must clearly and prominently acknowledge
any source code examples or other materials to which you refer. To do
so include an annotated "bibliography" giving a pointer
to each source (or attaching a copy if is not available online)
and indicating the degree of influence on your own work.
 
If you accurately acknowledge all sources you referred to,
then you will not be in violation of the academic integretity
code. However, if one of the annotations says, we downloaded
this code, changed minor things and turned it in, you won't get
a very good grade.
 
Violations of academic integrity are easy to define ("using
something without proper attribution").  "Borrowing too extensively"
is much harder to define, but pretty easy to recognize when you
see it. If by borrowing from a source, you make the assignment
trivial then that is borrowing too extensively. Someone I know
used the "Gilligan's Island rule" (If you can read something,
then go watch 30 mintues of Gilligans Island then return to
 your own work and incorporate what you've learned without
referring back to the original source then you are probably
fine) - silly but not bad.  Another rule of thumb is that
I wouldn't expect you to be *beginning* from source code
written by someone else and modifying it. I would expect you to
begin writing your own code and possibly referring to other
sources for ideas.
 
Hope that helps define the line,
Jeanna
 
 
Example of an Annotated Bibliography:
 
http://www.foo.com/sourcecodecollection/bar
skimmed over for 20 minutes for ideas; it
was helpful  but we didn;t use any source code lines
directly
 
http://www.blaz.org/blam
Thought it would contain useful ideas, spent
2 hours wading through it and still couldn't
make heads or tails of it
 
http://www.foo.edu/bleck
Went looking for fix to specific problem we were having and
used the 5 line fix verbatim,
 
"Writing Source Code for fun and profit" by Edward Socket
This book was very helpful. We used the code samples
directly as a basis for our code.
 
file.java
A friend gave us a copy of this code. We borrowed heavily
from it and have attached a copy for reference.