Policies

Academic Integrity

In order to maintain a culture of academic integrity, members of the University of Waterloo community are expected to promote honesty, trust, fairness, respect and responsibility.

Grievance

A student who believes that a decision affecting some aspect of their university life has been unfair or unreasonable may have grounds for initiating a grievance (Policy 70). When in doubt please be certain to contact the department/school’s administrative assistant who will provide further assistance.

Discipline

A student is expected to know what constitutes academic integrity to avoid committing academic offences and to take responsibility for their actions. A student who is unsure whether an action constitutes an offence, or who needs help in learning how to avoid offences (e.g., plagiarism, cheating) or about ”rules” for group work/collaboration should seek guidance from the course professor, academic advisor, or the undergraduate associate dean. For information on categories of offences and types of penalties, students should refer to Policy 71.

For typical penalties check Guidelines for the Assessment of Penalties.

Appeals

A decision made or penalty imposed under Policy 70, Student Petitions and Grievances (other than a petition) or Policy 71, Student Discipline may be appealed if there is a ground. A student who believes they have a ground for an appeal should refer to Policy 72, Student Appeals.

Note for students with disabilities

AccessAbility Services, located in Needles Hall, Room 1401, collaborates with all academic departments/schools to arrange appropriate accommodations for students with disabilities without compromising the academic integrity of the curriculum. If you require academic accommodations to lessen the impact of your disability, please register with AccessAbility Services at the beginning of each academic term.

Using Code from Other Sources

Students are expected to submit their own work.

If you use code from other sources (e.g. Stack Overflow, online article, etc.) you must document the source as a comment where the specific code is used. As a general rule, no single source can constitute more than 10% of the code you submit for a programming-based course component.

You can use any code from workshops or demos provided in this course without documenting it as a source.

Using Advanced AI Systems

Use of advanced AI systems to generate code (ie. CoPilot, ChatGPT, Claude etc.) is considered using code from other sources. The same rules apply from the previous policy: each AI system source must be documented and no single source can constitute more than 10% of programming-based course component.

Using advanced AI systems to summarize papers or generate written course components is permitted as long as you disclose exactly what portions of your work were generated by AI (which ideas, terms, sections, paragraphs, sentences, etc.) and provide a record of your session with the AI system (the series of prompts you used and the answers provided by AI). This disclosure should be submitted with the course component. Failure to do so could result in a grade of 0 and/or academic integrity discipline.

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Intellectual Property

Students should be aware that this course contains the intellectual property of their instructor, TA, and/or the University of Waterloo. Intellectual property includes items such as:

• Lecture content, spoken and written (and any audio/video recording thereof)
• Lecture handouts, presentations, and other materials prepared for the course (e.g., PowerPoint slides)
• Questions or solution sets from various types of assessments (e.g., assignments, quizzes, tests, final exams), and
• Work protected by copyright (e.g., any work authored by the instructor or TA or used by the instructor or TA with permission of the copyright owner).
• All source code written by the instructor and provided in lecture, as starter code for an assignment, or in a sample code repository.

Course materials and the intellectual property contained therein, are used to enhance a student’s educational experience. However, sharing this intellectual property without the intellectual property owner’s permission is a violation of intellectual property rights. For this reason, it is necessary to ask the instructor, TA and/or the University of Waterloo for permission before uploading and sharing the intellectual property of others online (e.g., to an online repository). Permission from an instructor, TA or the University is also necessary before sharing the intellectual property of others from completed courses with students taking the same/similar courses in subsequent terms/years. In many cases, instructors might be happy to allow distribution of certain materials. However, doing so without expressed permission is considered a violation of intellectual property rights.