Plagiarism--don't do it: Plagiarism means presenting somebody else's work as if it's your own. You may use whatever outside sources (books, friends, interviews, periodicals) are appropriate for an assignment, so long as you cite them: Any time you use two or more words in a row that you didn't think up and write yourself, you must put the words in quotation marks and indicate where they came from. (There could be situations where this two-word rule isn't appropriate. If you think you have one, check with us.) Even if you paraphrase (state in your own words) someone else's work or ideas, you should cite the source (e.g., "Dijkstra says that unrestricted branching is dangerous."). Plagiarism is academically dishonest, and we expect that nobody in the class will engage in it.

That should be enough said, but unfortunately there have been instances of plagiarism in these courses in the past. To protect the value of the independent work that all students do, all student work in this course may be compared for textual analysis and evidence of plagiarism to the work of other students, both in this course and in others, both manually and by using software that compares students' work with work from other sources, including the Internet and work submitted in previous quarters. This may involve the storage of students' work on computer systems outside of the university, such as the Turnitin.com reference database; this storage is solely for purposes of detecting plagiarism.

ICS school policy is that plagiarists fail the course and have their offense recorded in the department office. Academic honesty violations can affect a student's graduation, financial aid, and eligibility for honors. The school deals with plagiarism cases every quarter, even though most people don't hear about them. No matter how pressured you feel, don't plagiarize; it's not worth it.