Retraction Policy

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:

Email Juliette by November 16th that you would like to retract one or more specific assignments. You do not need to elaborate on what happened. Only do this if you are certain that the code is improper, and you have decided that it is best to not take credit for it. This will zero out the score for the work, but we will drop that work as far as any honor-code investigation or working with the Stanford OCS office. We will treat the work as if it was not handed in, and that's the end of it.
If you are not sure if something is problematic, please come and talk to Juliette, Chris or Mehran by November 16th. We very much appreciate that people are trying to do the right thing, and we will meet for an anonymous, non-judgmental review of what has happened and what is the best way forward.