November 4th, 2020
Typically in CS106A, we run analytic software over all the submissions to find sections of code that are copied from somewhere. A staffer then looks at the code more carefully to figure out what happened and who is involved. We have not done this yet for this quarter, so this notice is a chance for anyone who made a bad choice earlier in the quarter to set the record straight before we find it ourselves.
Essentially, our honor code policy says that you can exchange ideas with other students and the staff, but then you should take those insights and use them to write your own code. If you are in a discussion with students or in office hours, and a few lines of code are written, it is fine to learn from those lines and incorporate them while writing your own code. That is within the spirit of exchanging ideas and writing code.
In contrast, an honor code violation looks more like someone had access to solution code or someone else's solution for one or more assignments and used it significantly. The CS department has become adept at finding code like that within the submissions.
If you are concerned that some of your work may violate those rules, there are 2 possible actions: