CS 175: Academic Integrity

Academic dishonesty includes Cheating, Dishonest Conduct, Plagiarism, and Collusion. University regulations require that violations of academic integrity must be referred to the OAISC. Please familiarize yourself with the UCI Policy on Academic Integrity and speak to the instructor if you have any questions about what is and is not allowed in this course

For specific additional policies for this course, related to Individual Assignments and Team Projects, please read the text below.

For policies related to the use of AI, we recognize that GenAI tools are ubiquitous and can help you learn, but your submissions must be your own original work. In this course, GenAI is a consulting tool, not an author.

Failure to follow any of the policies listed or referred to on this page could result in getting a 0 for the submission or getting an F for the course overall.

Policy for Team Projects: Proposal and Reports

• All submitted work must be the work of students on the team receiving credit.
• All students on a team are expected to understand (at least at some level) the contents of a proposal or report from their team.
• Policy on use of GenAI for Proposals and Reports
  • ALLOWED:
    • Using an AI tool to assist in brain-storming, finding ideas or papers, finding definitions and explanations for terms and methods
    • Manually writing an initial draft (no AI help), then (i) asking an AI tool to review the draft and to provide a bulleted list of suggestions of how it can be improved, and (ii) manually rewriting the draft based on the AI suggestions
    • Asking an AI tool to check the final draft for typos and grammar that you then manually fix
    • Providing the AI tool with a suggestion for a figure and asking it to generate the figure. If you do this then you need to provide an acknowledgement of this fact in the figure caption (e.g., ``Used Gemini to assist in creating this figure")
  • NOT ALLOWED:
    • Having the AI directly generate any text in your document or asking it to generate any text for your document.
    • Asking the AI to rewrite text that you wrote.

Policy for Team Projects: Code

• All submitted work must be the work of students who are on the team receiving credit, except for the exceptions listed below related to (i) open-source code, and (ii) AI-generated code
• Open-Source code: teams can can use open-source code in their projects as long as the use of this code is clearly listed in submitted reports
• Policy on use of GenAI for Code for Team Projects
  • ALLOWED:
    • Using an AI tool to assist in understanding an algorithm or concept or method (so that the student can implement it in code)
    • Using an AI tool for line completion (when writing code), for explaining error messages, for debugging (AI suggests improvements which you can then manually implement), using AI to explain code written by others (e.g., open-source code), using AI to assist in documentation
    • You can use AI-generated code (if you wish) for any components of your project that are not AI-related , for example, components that don't involve machine learning or NLP tasks. Components that are "not AI-related" could be for example a Web crawler to gather data from Internet sources, or a user interface/demo to illustrate your project. Any such use of an AI tool should be clearly mentioned in your submitted reports.
  • NOT ALLOWED:
    • Using an AI tool to write code directly (e.g., based on a text prompt that you provide, or asking an AI tool to rewrite your code) except in the case of non-AI-related components of your project as described above,

Policy for Individual Assignments:

• all submitted student work, including solutions and code, must be the work of the individual student receiving credit. Students are allowed to verbally discuss assignments with other students in the course but are not allowed to view or share any written information with other students (such as written notes, notes on a whiteboard, solutions typed up by other students, etc).
• Policy on use of GenAI for individual assignments (adapted from Prof Alane Suhr's NLP course at UC Berkeley):
  We recognize GenAI tools are ubiquitous and can help you learn, but your submissions must be your own original work. In this course, GenAI is a consulting tool, not an author.
  • ALLOWED (WITH CITATION):
    • Asking for clarification of error messages, APIs, or unfamiliar library behavior.
    • Asking for conceptual explanations (How are logistic models trained using cross-entropy?), or workflow planning (What would be good error checking to add to tokenizer code?).
    • If you use GenAI in any of ways listed above, you need to include an Acknowledgement as a cell in your notebook solution, stating clearly (i) what tool you used and (ii) for what purpose.
  • NOT ALLOWED:
    • Pasting any assignment text, dataset identifiers, or prompts directly into GenAI.
    • Tab-based code completion.
    • Vibe coding. Do not blindly paste output or rely on agents to implement your assignments.
    • Requesting (from an AI tool) solutions, proofs, derivations, or code for assignment parts.
  • If you have any questions please reach out to the professor or a TA by posting a question on Ed