3. FAQ on Learning and Plagiarism

This page is written by Prof. Ilya Sergey (referred to as “I/me” below) to outline the learning objectives of his classes, as well as many similar classes offered by Yale-NUS MCS. It will provide answers to some frequent questions regarding the homework assessment and and treatment of plagiarism cases

3.1. On Learning Objectives

Computing classes at Yale-NUS MCS major are designed to provide actionable knowledge for solving various computational problems by means of writing computer programs and reasoning about their quality (correctness, performance, etc). Therefore, most the assessment is done via coding-heavy projects that are aimed to make the students think about specific problems and come up with solutions on their own and, less frequently, in small teams.

Whenever a task is told to be completed individually, it actually means that you are expected to find a solution yourself. It is absolutely crucial that you are mindful about the importance of working on solving the problem using your own understanding and expertise, and without attempting to get parts of the solution from available sources (your peers, a peer tutor, the internet), as this defeats the whole point of the carefully designed learning process.

You might feel concerned about the fact that you cannot come up with a solution for the assignments in what seems to be a reasonable amount of time, and that the class makes you struggle. In most of the cases, this is normal—these are legitimately difficult disciplines that require your full engagement and pay off in skills that will help you land on highly-paid jobs in industry and academia, with a great job security in the future.

Indeed, there might be factors that are beyond anyone’s control and interfere with your learning process (e.g., mental of physical illness, or other comparable hardships). At Yale-NUS College, we are determined to mitigate the impacts of those events on the quality of your education and are willing to make reasonable adjustments.

All that said, some of you occasionally find yourself in situations when the set rules for assessing your knowledge seem unfair and not doing justice to your efforts, penalising you for no good reason. This FAQ is aimed to clarify the reasons why those rules are set in this particular way.

3.2. On Submission Policies

I had a really rough week and feel very stressed, having hard time to focus on the homework. May I have an extension?

You can have either one “free” 48-hour or two 24-hour extensions for any of your homework projects except for the group research project. To get this extension, please, inform me three hours before the deadline. Extensions won’t be granted to the requests sent later than that.

Also, the group projects are not amenable for “free” extensions.

You can have an additional “regular” extension in the case if you have a Medical Certificate or an Assistant Dean’s letter. Medical Doctors and ADs are trained to assess the severity of your situation and, therefore, have an authority to grant extensions; I am unqualified to do so.

In case of a group project the “regular” extension is granted to the entire team.

Okay, I didn’t realise that the task will take that much time, I used all my free extensions, and I don’t have a reason qualifying me or an AD letter. If you don’t give me an extension, what should I do?

I’m afraid, in this case you do your best and possibly take a penalty for a late submission.

This is rather harsh. Other profs allow for an infinite number of resubmissions.

Specific submission/resubmission policies are up to each prof; they might vary depending on the size of the class, nature of the assignments, as well as other duties that the prof must handle concurrently.

3.3. On Approaching the Tasks

I’ve spent way more than 7 hours on a homework task, and I have no idea how to solve it. What am I supposed to do?

First, try to reflect on how you’ve spent those 7+ hours.

I expect that some fraction of that time has been spent revising the lecture materials, i.e., slides, lecture notes, and Zoom recordings. Those are designed to be self-contained, so you’re not required to read the textbook (unless you feel interested in the details). Try to think how the material from the recent lectures is relevant to solving the task.

It is also not a bad idea to “sketch” some executions of the program you’re asked to implement on a paper—this should help big time to understand its corner cases. Next, before your start implementing the main program, write some tests. I usually provide a rudimentary test suite, but please, do not simply copy/paste code from it, changing the numbers—this is of no help to your understanding. Instead, try to implement a testing scenario that reflects the executions you’ve had in mind.

Now, you’ve got the tools, the tests, and the understanding of the problem—so you’re nearly there! Most of the programs in my assignments are not that large, and, if you’ve done your diligence with the previous parts, you should be able to write a program that is very close to a correct one. More tests/”paper debugging” should help to eviscerate the remaining bugs.

Okay, I’ve done all of that, but I still don’t know how to write that program. Should I ask for help now?

So, I assume that by now you’ve gone through the following steps towards the solution of your homework:

Reviewing the lecture
Thinking about executions of the program in question
Designing and implementing tests
Writing the main program

If you’re stuck on (a)-(c), you should be able to phrase your problem, and it’s absolutely fine to seek help for this issue from your peers, the peer tutor, or the prof. Let’s talk about this next.

3.4. On Interaction with Peer Tutor

So I shouldn’t ask the tutor about how to solve the problem?

If you phrase your question this way, you make it very difficult for the tutor to help you without jeopardising your submission (see the next section). Peer tutors are students like yourself who took this class in the past. While they know solutions to the homework tasks, they are not trained to quickly identify the source of your confusion and struggle, so, being kind-hearted, they might feel compelled to reveal parts of the solution to ease your struggle. As mentioned above, you getting the solution this way renders the exercise useless, and also puts you at risk of getting penalised for plagiarism.

Wait, but what may I ask the tutor then?

Remember, your ultimate goal is to get good understanding of the material, so you’d be able to solve the problems on your own (and I’m confident you can do it). So why don’t you try asking the peer tutor the following questions that can help you with (a)-(c):

Can you explain me how this thing X from the lectures works and give some examples of programs that rely on it?
Can you give an example how the expected program from the homework task should work?
What would be a good scenario to test for this problem?

Do you mean there are BAD questions to ask a peer tutor?

Oh, plenty! Here are some examples.

Can you hint the structure of the solution?

This is the same as asking for a part of the solution. The tutor might not have a good intuition of what is an essential part of the task, so by revealing the structure, as asked, they might ruin the assignment for your and give me a fair ground to penalise you for plagiarism.

My code doesn’t work, and I don’t know why. Can you take a look?

It is beyond the peer tutor’s capacity to work as your personal debugger. It is also a well-known fact that if you start talking out loud about your failing tests and what your implementation does, you will most likely find a bug very soon (this is so-called “rubber duck debugging”).

For the same reason it’s not a good idea to as the prof this question. In a limited number of cases, I might know what causes a certain problem (as I’ve seen my share of those issues), but I don’t have an immediate fix for every possible bug (and, just like a tutor, I’m not your personal debugging assistant). Furthermore, by asking this you deprive yourself of the precious “aha” moment when you find the bug.

Can I show you my code and you tell me if it’s okay?

This is not a great question for a number of reasons. First, you ask the tutor to provide an assessment that you should be able to do yourself (by writing tests and benchmarks). Second, it increases the chance of some of your peer students seeing your code and adopting some parts of it for yourself (this counts as plagiarism for all involved parties). This is even more likely to happen in virtual Zoom sessions, when one of the participants shares their screen. For the same reason, if the peer tutor is going to show parts of their solution/share their screen, remind them not to do so.

To conclude, your interactions with the peer tutor should aim at filling the holes in your understanding of the lecture material and the assignment tasks, but not at “fishing” for implementation strategies. It’s okay to ask them about tests, but only at the level of “paper-and-pencil” discussion, not sharing the tests implementation.

3.5. On Plagiarism and Penalties

As of now, I define plagiarism at my class as follows:

Obtaining the answer directly from anyone or anything else in any form
Adapting a solution from a similar one found on the internet
“Copying with understanding” from other resources

The penalty for the first detected plagiarism attempt is 0 points for the assignment, and it’s F for the module in the case of the second strike.

I’ve just got 0 points for my solution, but I didn’t copy my code, so it shouldn’t count as plagiarism.

This is because your submission didn’t pass my plagiarism detector (it’s not a particular automated test, but rather a sequence of checks I do). I have a number of “red flags” I check for, but I’m not going to share them here. Rest assured, I do not issue this penalty unless I’m 100% sure that the solution is not original.

The fact that your that code didn’t pass my plagiarism check is a symptom, but it’s indicative of the problem: you’ve taken a shortcut on the most important part of a class—learning the material and applying your understanding of it to solve the homework task. Above, I provided some advice on how to address the problem. The penalty here serves simply as a deterrent against this attitude.

I am not really interested in the provenance of the code that has been plagiarised. In any event, there are quite a few common scenarios I’ve heard about over the years, so let me show how the most popular ones are indicative of the bigger issue—a student skipping the learning process and trying to get the solution without taking the class seriously.

“My solution is similar to the one by the student A, because we’ve got the same recipe from the peer tutor.”

We’ve covered this above: it was not a great idea of ask the tutor to reveal parts of the solution, but, obviously, I’m not going to penalise them. In any event, this is qualified as type-(1) plagiarism.

“My solution is similar to the one by the student A, because we share a lot of background and came up with a very similar idea.”

While this is, indeed, possible, there is enough inherent diversity in solutions for the tasks, so I could tell with certainty whether code sharing took place, when looking at two solutions by two different people.

“My tests are similar to those of the student A, because we both simply modified the tests that you have provided.”

We’ve talked about this above. This is again indicative of a large problem: should you have tried to write your own tests, this would have never happened.

“I have accidentally stumbled upon a solution in a different programming language on the internet, but I made sure I understood it before translating parts of it to the language of this class (OCaml/Scala)”.

This is a type-(3) plagiarism. Don’t be surprised if the way I detected it is because some of your peers (to whom you might have even never spoken) did the same.

But now, with this penalty, I won’t get an A for the class so my GPA will go down.

If you are serious about a career in computing, this should not be an issue for the following reasons.

If you’re going to apply for an industry job in a software company, it is most important for you to able to demonstrate your skills on an interview and with your task project. This is what I’m optimising the outcomes of my classes for.

As for graduate school admissions, it’s unlikely that a single B will kill your application. At the end there will be an interview, at which you can always tell about how you learned about concept X at my class in a hard way—people will appreciate your honesty and technical sophistication.

Finally, you can always S/U a class.