Section 1.2 Submitted Mathematical Work
This section is about assignment, take-home exams, and any other mathematical work you submit. The principle here is simple. When you work, it must be your own work: your own thoughts, your own sentences, your own calculations. This is the point of an assignment. I don’t set assignments because I need to mark something; I set assignments to encourage you to do the active work of solving mathematical problems, which is nearly the entire point of taking a mathematics course. I want each of you to actually do your assignments, since that’s where some of the most important learning happens.
That said, working in groups on assignments is excellent and highly encouraged. Mathematics is well suited to groups, where you can remind each other of ideas, correct each other’s mistakes, and help each through conceptual barriers. Groups are great. However, at the end of your group work, you still have to produce your own assignment. You should never be copying, word-for-word or calculation-for-calculation, another student’s assignment. Please work together: talk through the questions, check each other’s work for errors, all these things. But please produce your own work at the end.
I have produced a list that summarizes the specifics of my assignment expectations for academic honesty. (This list repeats some of the expectations in Chapter 2, but elaborates more on the academic honesty pieces.)
- Obviously, you can’t just copy another student’s assignment. That’s cheating, regardless of whether you had permission to copy. Given that you are reading this, I’m assuming that you are, in fact, trying to do your work honestly.
- If you work with a group, you still need to write your own assignments. Often your calculations will be nearly identical to your group, and that’s to be expected (though you should always do your own calculations and understand them, not just copy someone else’s calculations). Your sentences that surround your calculations, however, should not be the same sentences as any other student’s. Write up your own work, use your own words to explain calculations and answer conceptual questions.
- If you work with students in the class, note the names of the students you worked with at the end of your assignments. This is quite simple: just write, "On this assignments, I worked with NAME, NAME and NAME". This is appreciated since it gives credit for the help your received from your group. It also helps for marking; when assignments are very similar, if I can see that students worked together, that similarity is expected. (Identical assignments are still a problem, as discussed above).
- It’s fine if someone else (a friend, a family member, a tutor, etc) helps you with an assignment. However, it is not acceptable if they do the questions for you. They should help you figure out how do to the problem, often by working through the main concepts and similar examples problems, and then you should do the problems on your own and write up your solutions on your own.
- If you used another book (article, etc.), you must cite that book just as you would in an English course. You may use any citation style.
- I’ll talk about the use of internet resources in the next section, since that topic deserves its own section.
