A Note on Projects

Copying text from anothers work, be it scientific or not, without explicitly referencing it is called PLAGIARISM. Our department has very strict rules about this ethical breach, arguably the worst thing you can do in a scientific setting, apart from reporting false results. Similarly, downloading a program code and pretending that you have written it is shameless conduct, and deserves disciplinary punishment.

Explicit referencing means, whenever you copy text verbatim (that is word for word), you should place it in quotes to show that you haven't written it, but you're merely referencing it. Then you give reference to the work and page number if available, in parantheses next to the quotation. As you should know, quotations are usually used for definitions, where the wording itself may be relevant for the interpretation, or where an authors opinion is discussed, and thus it is presented to the reader for objective evaluation. There may be other cases where quotation is relevant, but it should not be used for something that can be equally well explained in other words.

Copying large amounts of material from other work with reference is also plagiarism. Please note that if you ever submit this kind of copied material, without EXPLICIT reference, to a scientific conference of journal, you will suffer dire consequences, and your academic life will possibly end there and then.

I'm ready to reassess the grade of anyone who successfully defends the argument that a senior term project in computer engineering can be conceived of a 5 minutes work of Internet search followed by a 10 minutes of copy-paste job.