I expect that you will do the assigned work by yourself. You should compose your own answers to any book assignments based on your personal understanding of the material. You should write any programs yourself based on your own programming ability. It is fine to discuss assignments with other students in the class - in fact, this is an excellent way to improve your personal understanding - but ultimately you should do the final writing yourself. If you are specifically permitted to work on a class project in a team, these rules should be applied to any help received from others not on your team.

If it seems too hard to complete your task without additional help, I would remind you that my primary duty as course instructor is to help you learn this material. You are always welcome to question me on any aspect of the assignments.

The entire point of assignments is to force you to understand the concepts presented in the course well enough that you can use them (to write answers or write programs). Your personal satisfaction and future earnings depend on how well you learn to do these things (write, program, analyze situations) yourself. Using someone else's work makes no more sense than trying to get into shape by asking a friend to exercise for you!

The following rules (closely based on a set by Prof. Darrah Chavey of Beloit College) may help define appropriate assistance:

• Anything a helper can say without looking at your code or writing down any code for you is good help (discussion about class topics and programming topics are GOOD).
• If a helper actually types anything into your program, or you copy anything from their program into yours, that is dishonest.
• If a helper writes down a code example for you, explains it to you thoroughly, but then keeps the paper (so you have to write the program from your own understanding), that is good, honest help-similar to studying together.
• If you look at code another student wrote for you or for their program while typing in your own program, that is probably dishonest.
• If someone looks at your code to help you find a bug in it, or help explain why something you wrote isn't working right, or to give you their opinion about your programming style, that is almost certainly good, honest help (as long as they don't do any of the typing to correct your bugs or errors). However, you should strive to find bugs yourself.

These rules apply as well to help obtained from the Web. In other words, if you find a website that discusses a problem you're working on or you look at sample code to see some programming trick, that's probably OK. But, if you copy code from the web into your program or look at sample code while typing in your own program, that is probably dishonest.