## Plagiarism

You must work entirely on your own on every problem you wish to
submit – this applies both to practice exercises and to assignment
sets. This does not mean that you are forbidden from studying for
the subject with others: for this purpose, you can use all the
remaining exercises in this collection (i.e. those that none of you
are going to submit) and of course the countless programming
exercises you can find online.

The exercises which you submit serve to check that you in fact
understand the subject matter and can successfully apply it in
practice. This check is vital for your progress – it is extremely
easy to overestimate how well you understand something that you only
studied passively (by reading, listening to lectures or studying
solutions written by others). Unless you actually write a few
programs of a particular type, you are quite unlikely to actually
understand the problems at hand.

To dissuade you from working around those checks, we will penalise
any unsanctioned cooperation quite strictly. For each transgression,
you will lose (practice exercises from a single chapter count as a
single instance, each assignment from a set counts as a separate
instance):

 • 1/2 of the points you have received (for «all» exercises in the
   affected week, or for the affected assignment),
 • 10 points in the affected block,
 • 10 points (in addition to the previous 10) from the semester
   total.

For instance, if you plagiarise 2 practice exercises in the second
week, and

 • your total score for practice exercises this week is 4.5 points,
 • your total score for the first block is 65 points,

you will «automatically fail the subject» (65 - 2.25 - 10 is less
than the 60 points required to pass the block). The same will happen
if you plagiarise an assignment from the first set (65 - 5 - 10),
etc. If you have sufficient points in the affected block (e.g. 80 -
5 - 10 > 60), you can continue the course, but you are also
penalised 10 points on the sum, which means you need 250 (for
colloquium) or 180 (for credit only) points to pass.

Whether you have worked on a solution together, or one of you solved
the exercise and made their solution available to others is
immaterial. All ‘versions’ of a solution derived from a common base
are going to be penalised equally. Likewise, making your solution
public will be treated like a violation and penalised accordingly,
even if nobody else submits a solution based on the published one.

Finally, please note that plagiarism checks are not time limited in
the same way that regular grading is. If an instance of plagiarism
is detected at the end of the semester or even during the exam
period, the penalties will be applied retroactively.
