Reference Materials for Mathematics

Section 1.3 Internet Resources

• First and foremost, you have to cite what you use. Any websites, videos, calculation tools that you use for an assignment should be cited somewhere in your assignment. I find this expectation is often surprising to many students, but I’m serious. Internet resources are like any resources, and for academic writing, we cite our resources. We do this to give credit, since those who produced all these websites are helping us do our work.
• These citations should be specific as reasonable. Don’t vaguely say that you used Youtube or even Khan Academy; tell me specifically which video you watched that helped you and give me the URL. (When you submit a scanned PDF of written work, you can use the online text field in Moodle to submit your reference, if you wish, so that you don’t have to copy our complicated URLs in pen and paper.)
• Online calculation tools (Wolfram Alpha, Demos, Symbolab, and many others) are great. Feel free to use them to do calculations and to check your work. However, like all resources, you need to give credit. For calculation tools like these (and any other computer algebra systems), you can tell me at the start of the assignment that you used a calculation tool and then very briefly indicated the places that it was used in the assignment. If you simply double checked your work with any of these tools, just say so as part of your citations. Even if you do use these tools for calculation or checking, you still need to show enough work to make it clear that you understand the processes.
• In the above discussion, I am talking about sources without in-person interaction, such as online texts, encylopedias, video explanations, and calculation tools. The internet also has interactive sources: various places where you can ask for math help and receive responses from actual people to your specific questions. Some of these are free and some are paid serivces. I want to be very clear about my expectation for these kind of sites.

  It’s fine to ask general questions on a math forum or help site. Some like I need help figuring out how to solve systems of equations is very reasonable. If you want specific examples to ask about, use the activities in the course and ask people to help you understand the activities. However, please DO NOT post any assignment questions or take-home exam questions to any online math forum or help site. I need to draw a clear line here, so that it is easy for you to understand my expectations. Posting assignment questions or exam questions online is not acceptable.

• Often when students look online for material from the course, they will find similar material which differs in notations, definitions, or solution methods. Similarly, you may have previous mathematical experience that uses slightly different notations, definition or method. I have two important instructions for these situations.

  If you know another way of doing a problem, you need to explain to me, in the assignment, why your method works. Anything that comes from outside the course needs context: you can’t just use another method and expect me to understand what you are doing. You need to explain. Even if you know a different notation, I insist that you translate your knowledge and practice into the notation I use in the course. You must submit your assignment following the notational conventions I introduces in the videos and the notes.

• Two specific internet resources require their own specific nows. First, Wikipedia is not an authoratative source for quotationes. Wikipedia is an immensely useful source and a great place to look for reminders and concepts. I frequently use it informally to help remember various pieces of mathematics. But you can’t use it as an authority; you can’t claim that any definition, notation or method is correct because you read it on Wikipedia. If you want to do this, look for waht Wikipedia uses as souces and track those down, so that you can find a reasonable citation.
• Last, but not least, I need to talk about predictive language models: GPT and its friends on other platforms. Predictive language models can be a pretty fantastic resource, and it is certainly amazing what they can accomplish. I imagine that we are only just starting to understand it implications. So, what are the expectation for using it in mathematics courses? Well, it depends on what you do with it.
  You could ask a predictive language model to write your assignment text for you. However, recall what I wrote previously: when you submit work, I expect what you submit your own work: your own thoughts, your own sentences. Therefore, in my courses, you are not permitted to have a predictive language model write your assignment text for you.
  You could ask it to check your calculations for you; some language models are pretty good at math calculations. However, I discourage this usage as well. Above, I encouraged you to use Wolfram Alpha, Symbolab, Desmos and other online calculation tool. If you are going to use a computer for calcuation, I suggest these. Why not use GPT or another language model? Well, because they are language models: they are designed to mimic language. They don’t, fundamentally, have either the goal or the design for accuracy in answers. They’ll produce something that looks and sounds like reasonable mathematics, but it might simply be totally wrong.
  Lastly, if you do use GPT or another language model in some other way, you do have to cite it. King’s has decided, as a policy for all courses, that use of language model text without citation does, in fact, constitute plagiarism. This is a serious academic offence with serious reprocusions. Even if you unsure about the two previous point and do end up trying to use a language model, at the very least give your source.