Academic Honesty

All students in this course are expected to follow these rules of ethical conduct:

• As a member of the Simon Fraser University community, you are bound by its Code of Academic Integrity and Good Conduct. Read it!
• Unless explicitly stated otherwise, all assignments and assessed activities must be your own original work. You must cite any help you get, whether it be from people (friends, TAs, instructors, your uncle who works at Microsoft, etc.), or from books, websites, magazines, and so on.
• You may not lend or borrow assignments. For instance, we consider it dishonest if you give a friend on another team a copy of part of your team's assignment so they can learn from it.
• Markers will use software to check for suspicious assignments. Such programs simply flag suspicious files, and the marker will then manually investigate further.

Can you use ChatGPT or other AI tools?

As mentioned in the class, we are aware of them. I see them as helpers/tutors from which you can look for inspiration. However, these tools are not reliable and they tend to be overly confident about their answers, sometimes even incorrect. It is also very easy to come to rely on them and put yourself at risk of not actually learning anything and even committing academic dishonesty.

Other issues include:

• When it comes to uncertainty, you won’t know how to determine what is correct.
• If you need to modify or fine tune your answer, you won’t know what to do.
• You will not be able to learn the materials and thus will not be able to apply what you learn in situations where no external help is available, for example, during exams and interviews.

For introductory level courses and less sophisticated questions, it is likely that you’ll get an almost perfect answer from these tools. For complex assignments, you will likely not get a full answer. Bottomline is, if you ask these tools to give you an answer and you use the answer as yours, you are committing academic dishonesty by claiming work that is not done by you as yours.

If you decide to use AI tools to help with your assignments, state in your comments what tools you have used and how you used them. Also make sure you understand what they are telling you and write your answers with your own hands (do not just copy & paste). This does not mean you are immune to academic dishonesty but it will help the instructor to understand your situation and make an accurate decision.

Note that different instructors might have different policies regarding the use of these tools. Check with them before you proceed with assignments from other courses.