Peer Assistance

Overall I encourage you to work together with other students in the class on homework problems and get advice from each other about projects. Talking with other students about the problems is yet another way to engage with the material. It uses a different part of your brain and in particular will help you think about the different ways to do the problems. It can actually be disconcerting in a truly wonderful way to hear how classmates think about and solve these problems. It makes you think critically at a really deep level. For example, your classmate may have arrived at the wrong answer using means that appear on the surface to be acceptable, or the right answer via a completely different method than what you used. You may get to discover together what is wrong or right! And if you don’t, you should bring it to me and we can figure it out. The ability to notice that something is wrong is enormously important. When you notice that something has gone wrong please congratulate yourself that you know something has gone wrong instead of beating yourself up that you did something wrong. Honestly being able to smell a wrong answer is 75\% of getting the right answer.

Working Together, Plagiarism, and the Honor Code

Working together means getting together to discuss problems, asking for help from other students on a step you are stuck on, or comparing solutions. I really encourage you to work together, and I know you will want to be mindful not crossing the line into plagiarism. We will follow the usual [CS Department Collaboration Policy] (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xpnhkXiqiQuktb_p8NkFKm-uhRCNoIYTeZPZTFLDIt4/edit). Remember that it is always fine to get help if you are away from the computer/code and then erase/destroy the tangible results outside of your own understanding. Informally, I encourage you to help each other learn the material and work on the labs, as long as you both feel that the help is always with learning that precedes any editing of the code; if you (or your friend) are making permanent notes about/in your code during the discussion, with the hopes of later understanding what you’ve done, you’ve probably crossed both the spirit and the letter of the policy. And, of course, collaboration is not allowed on exams.