Plagiarism is a type of fraud: to use the work or ideas of someone else as being yours in order to obtain better school results. Plagiarism is treated very seriously. The assignments which you give must be yours and do not have to contain the ideas of other people. Please consult the policy of the University of Ottawa on the school fraud for further information on plagiarism and its sanctions.
You can discuss the theory and the tools used in the assignments with your friends in
the class. Do not collaborate in the resolution of the questions in the assignment. No
written material should result from these discussions. You should not look at the
solutions of another student on paper or screen, even when it is incomplete. The
programming, the analysis of the results, the drafting of reports/ratios and the answers
to the assignments must be done individually (unless specified otherwise).
If you use resources (books, Internet…) at the time of the resolution of your
problems, then you should include the suitable references.
To help somebody to make plagiarism is also a serious offence. Do not lend your answers,
reports/projects, or diskettes, and do not let other people read or copy them. In order to
protect you from people who could copy your work, preserve all your work and drafts until
they were corrected and returned to you. If you suspect that somebody stole your work,
contact your professor immediately.
Even if you do your individual assignment without the assistance of other people, there
is nevertheless the possibility for the students helping others. For example, you can
re-examine difficult material of course/laboratoire, do exercises together, or help each
other to understand the statement of an assignment (while limiting itself to the problem,
without discussing solutions).
The forums of discussion on WebCT can be used to speak about the techniques and tools used
in the duties, but the discussions should not mention partial solutions or potential with
the questions of the assignment.
If you do not know if a question that you wish to pose (or to which you would like to
answer) goes against these hot lines, then discuss the question with your teaching
assistant (TA) or with your professor. If the answer can be of general interest,
this will be communicated to all the students in the course.
The TAs have the order to report any suspicion of plagiarism (during the correction) to
the professor. Suitable measures will be taken if it is found that an assignment (or part
of it) was copied.
This document is based on " Policy on
Plagiarism " by Dr. Amy Felty (September 2002).