.. _academic_malpractice: Academic malpractice -------------------- Some of the coding tasks we'll look at, particularly early on, are relatively straight forwards and many submitted solutions will inevitably look very similar. We recognize that there are only so many ways of writing something. (Although similar does not mean exactly the same!) We also want to encourage you to speak with one another, to discuss issues or why some code works and some code doesn't work to understand why. `Pair or buddy programming `_, `code reviews `_, or just working as part of a wider team, are widely used techniques in industry to accelerate programming and to help catch bugs. Collaborative working is essential in large projects, which may have millions of lines of code; too many to be written by a single person. In programming there is a long tradition of `open source programming `_, where people make their code freely and easily available for others to use and build upon. However, in the summative parts of the course our aim is to assess how well *you* have learnt the topics covered, and we need to see *your* work to do this. For the avoidance of doubt: - **All submitted tasks for this course are individual assignments.** - **If you use code or libraries from others this must be clearly stated and suitably referenced.** - **Use of artificial intelligence for writing your code must be declared and justification for its use given.** - **Plagiarism, collusion, or other forms of academic malpractice may be referred for investigation and lead to a mark of 0 being given for that component of the course, or higher sanctions** Further information on potential sanctions is given in the :ext_uom_malpractice_policy:`University policies <>`.