Section 1.3 Working With Peoples
Working in groups of classmates 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.
Similarly, getting help from people outside of your class is strongly encouraged. This includes friends, family members, and hired or volunteer tutors. Mathematics can be challenging, so if you have access to help from someone, then please take advantage of that help. The same general rule from the previous paragraph still applies: get help to understand the mathematics, but then do you own work. Don’t let anyone else actually write your assignments for you -- that is cheating and is an academic honesty violation.
Here are some more notes about working with other people.
- Obviously, you can’t just copy another student’s assignment or have a family member, friend or tutor write the assignment for you. That’s cheating, regardless of whether you had permission to copy. When you hand in an assignment, you are always implicitly saying that this work is your own work, that you’ve done it yourself.
- 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).
